Fattypuffs and Thinifers

Product Information

When brothers Edward and Terry find a staircase leading down between two rocks little do they know the adventure they are about to embark on. The fattypuffs and thinifers duke it out in a war for supremacy, eventually signing a peace treaty and agreeing to live side by side.

The book contains a series of amusing and well thought out illustrations that blend well and add to the tale. It was a wonderfully droll account of war between two nations over the silliest and most nonsensical of philosophies and I was terribly impressed by the moral admonishment it contained about the eternal senselessness of human warfare. The fat boy finds himself in a country where everyone and everything is fat while the thin boy does the opposite.

For centuries Fattypuffs and Thinifers have been mortal enemies, having fought one another already in the War of the Captive Armies. I loved this book as a child, and for some reason I was thinking about it tonight so I looked it up on Goodreads. As a 'Thinnifer' child I empathised totally with the 'Fattypuffs' and loved their comfortable laid back lifestyle and the fact that they got to eat six square meals a day with light snacks in between and didn't give a damn about their weight.

To my great fortune, I recently happened across a passing reference by someone on the internet about the book (in a totally different context) and was able to finally obtain the author's name, an accurate title, and an ISBN for this jewel of an allegorical children's book. Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives.With illustrations as enchanting as the text inside, this kids-book-with-an-adult-theme of (all too familiar) warring tribalism between two subterranean kingdoms both equally hilariously insane encountered by two boys, unwitting travellers to the underworld. It concerns the imaginary underground land of the fat and congenial Fattypuffs and the thin and irritable Thinifers, which is visited by the Double brothers, the plump Edmund and the thin Terry. If you are a parent/adult fretting about how to keep up the momentum for a boy who has gone through Harry Potter, Darren Shan, Anthony Horowitz and even the late, excellent children's author Douglas Hill, and who is now drifting ominously back towards the idiot box in the corner or the latest mega-gore-slaughter-death IQ-murdering computer game, then find this, Andre Maurois' finest hour.