With both of his eco-campaigning parents out of the house, Percy can’t resist peeking into the spare room to see what his mum is hiding there. And when her realises it’s a gene blender, the super-secret machine his mum’s been working on for years, designed to bring back extinct animals, well, he just can’t resist trying it out on his annoying neighbour Perfect Penny’s equally annoying sausage dog Chip.
Before you can say “Jurassic Park” or “uh-oh”, Chip is a small rhinoceros, Dr Cray from over the road is a (talking) rat and the machine is in bits on the floor. They need to fix it before his mum gets home but just as important they need to keep it out of the hands of evil entrepreneur Felicity Fischer, an amalgam of Cruella de Vil and Elon Musk.
The story starts off at pace and just gets speedier, the laughs coming thick and fast, while still finding time for Percy and Penny to develop as real characters. It’s great fun and culminates in a truly fantastic car chase.
Young Percy's parents are environmental activists, and Percy is super over it. He would rather stay home and play Xbox, rather than going to demonstrations every weekend. Meanwhile, his father wants to glue himself to a plastic bag factory, and his mum has invented a machine that messes with DNA and just might bring extinct species back to life.
And when the neighbour next door suddenly turns into a talking rat, Percy is roped into a hilarious, madcap adventure in which everyone seems to want to get their hands on the species machine - and Percy comes to appreciate what his parents are fighting for.
