Skylar and the K-Pop Headteacher by Luan Goldie
We have a fun guest post for you today featuring author Luan Goldie. She shares some fun books that feature body swapping with comedic outcomes! Have you read any of them?
Body swap stories in children’s books by Luan Goldie
I’ll be the first to say the plot of Skylar and the K-pop Headteacher, in which an eleven-year-old swaps bodies with a 71-year-old, is nothing new. Body swapping, especially when it happens between an adult and child, is a well-treaded and well-loved trope.
Of course, the appeal of body swaps isn’t really about being in someone else’s body at all, it’s about inhabiting another life. We’ve all wondered what it would be like to walk in another person’s shoes and books allow us to fully indulge in this fantasy.
The first body swap was published in 1882. In Vice Versa, A Lesson to Fathers a magical stone causes a father and son to swap. The book captured the public’s attention, with children siding with the boy character, who of course didn’t want to go back to his strict boarding school, and adults siding with the dad, who of course claimed school days were the best days of anyone’s life.
Vice versa comes from a Latin phrase meaning ‘the other way around’ and inspired a whole genre of body swap books, plays and films. Hollywood in the eighties put out a lot of these from 17 Again to Like Father Like Son and of course Big, which while not strictly a swap is great at capturing a child’s imagination about their adult life.
While writing Skylar I asked children what they would do if they were suddenly in charge of their own money and while many answered ‘give it to charity’ there were also lots of hilariously random answers I used in the book. From £85 worth of biscuits to fried chicken buffets and life-sized cardboard cut-outs of all eight members of her favourite K-pop boyband, Skylar loves splashing adult cash.
If your young readers enjoy Skylar’s antics they might also enjoy David Baddiel’s Head Kid, in which a cheeky prankster swaps with a super strict Head and proceeds to email the entire school staff the word ‘bum’. It’s silly and fun and if they get into Baddiel, there are seven other books to try next.
The multi-million selling series of Help! I’m Trapped… has seventeen books and each one presents a different swap, including an alien, supermodel and even Santa Claus. I’d also recommend the beautiful Me and My Cat by Satoshi Kitamura and There’s a Dog in My Brain! by Caroline Green. My nine year old couldn’t stop giggling at the idea of a child licking people and drinking from a toilet bowl.
For slightly older readers, there’s the classic Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers. While it centres the teenage experience, it was published in the seventies so it’s not as racy as what you would find in a modern book. There’s also Sister Switch by Beth Garrod, where opposite siblings visit the Hairy Godmother for a haircut and end up swapping and The Art of the Swap by Kristine Asselin, which brings historical and mystery elements to a traditionally comedy genre.
In a time where we’re all thinking about empathy, body swap books explore this without being explicitly preachy. Sure they show the fantastical and fun side of being another person but they also, if done well, get the reader to consider other viewpoints and understand that everyone is facing their own challenges.
Book credit:
Skylar and the K-pop Headteacher by Luan Goldie (Walker Books) available now.
