Tom is back for a second fooling-around adventure. When Tom, accompanied by his Aunt Bundlejoy, sets out on a jaunt in a jam-powered frog, Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen set out in hot pursuit in a pedal-powered snake. They are determined for revenge! Tom is running out of jam power but luckily there’s a girl’s boarding school not far off where more amazing and absurd events take place including a ferocious arm-wrestling match!
Another classic from Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, featuring a jam-powered frog and an eccentric headmistress ... as nutty and compulsive as ever.
A Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake classic, and a brilliant companion volume to How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, this is the story of Tom who invents a jam-powered frog. Fooling around as he loves to do, Tom takes his Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet out on the frog out for a spin. When Captain Najork sees them hopping past his window, he and his hired sportsmen jump into their pedal-powered snake and set off in hot pursuit. Events, adventure and sheer craziness conspire to bring Tom and the Captain together at the local girls' boarding school, where Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork is in the middle of a best-of-three arm-wrestling contest against the Headmistress… A rip-roaring adventure guaranteed to keep the pages turning and the laughs bouncing off the ceiling!
Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, USA. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine; his father was the advertising manager of a Jewish newspaper as well as a dram guild director. Russell was thus exposed to the arts early on, and became interested in writing at an early age, winning prizes for his stories and poems during his school years.
As an adult
Russell served in the US Infantry during WWII. For a time he taught art in New York and Connecticut. He then worked as a freelance illustrator and an advertising copywriter. He began publishing children's books in 1958, and since then has published more than fifty. His picture book The Sea-Thing Child, illustrated by Patrick Benson, was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Russell passed away at the age of 86 in 2011.