The Trouble with Sauce

The Trouble with Sauce

Bullying.
Performance-enhancing drugs.
How Bruno Bouchet tackles serious issues in a hilarious new comedy-adventure for kids!

'Comedy is so important- it's the one medium where children can explore all sorts of challenging ideas without being confronted by them'- Bruno Bouchet.

Bruno Bouchet's latest comedy for 8-12 year olds is a riotous adventure set in a school where the principal attempts to drug the children into behaving perfectly and studying hard. Suddenly Jonty Townsend goes from being one of the coolest kids in the school to being the dumb idiot shunned by his brilliant classmates. Along with the two new friends he makes, Jonty attempts to restore his school to its rightful state- full of naughty children!

'The Trouble with Sauce, like all my kids books, is a comedy that lets children explore different ideas in an entertaining environment. I love the excitement and pace of writing children's fiction and enjoy the challenge of finding the balance between extreme adventure, big laughs and the right amount of realism to help carry the reader along', Bruno says.

Bullying
Bullying is one of the biggest issues in our school today, and with the advent of texting, social websites and email it has taken a whole new dimension. The book features a wide variety of bullying tactics: tricks on teachers and other students, physical abuse, verbal abuse, condescending teachers, cyber-bullying and intellectual disdain.

Bruno points out that 'some of the incidents in the book seem funny and make people laugh, only to be challenged by the reality of bullying later. I play with the power dynamic between teachers and students in the book so the reader can explore what happens when different groups gain control of the school environment. Young readers can begin to view a classroom from a teacher's perspective.

'Bullying is a challenging subject for children as victims or perpetrators or as both. This book aims to let children explore this difficult topic without any feelings of guilt or pain. It's why comedy is a powerful medium- it lets us explore difficult topics in a safe environment'.

Performance-Enhancing Drugs
Another of the themes in the book, is the idea of performance-enhancing drugs and what actually constitutes one. While everyone agrees that the use of drugs to enhance physical performance is 'cheating', what about drugs that enhance mental performance or drugs that alter behaviour? Would a drug that mad everyone behave perfectly and study hard be 'cheating'? The issue is explored in a number of ways: more subtly through the characters' reactions to the drug in the sauce and in a more directly comic way when the perfect students attempt to 'force' performance enhancement on Jonty and his friends.

Bruno Bouchet was born in Spain with a British mother, French father and Italian grandmother, he moved to Britain when he was three, growing up in the seaside town of Morecambe. After working in a London advertising agency for a few years, he moved to Sydney in 1990 to study a Masters of Business Administration. After completing that he decided the high flying corporate world was not for him.

Turning his back on that, he discovered greater rewards in his writing career, both through creative writing and advertising copywriting. He now works full-time as a writer and novelist.

Bruno's first children's book, Ta-Da! (Hodder) was released in 2004. In 2007 he released three children's books with ABC, Lab Rats in Space, The Curse of Captain Wetbeard and Dorothy's Rosy Tea Party.

The Trouble with Sauce
ABC Books
Author: Bruno Bouchet