Product Description

Dinah moves in with the Hunter family and starts going to the same school as her foster-brothers Lloyd and harvey. It's not easy, as they seem to hate her, and school is really strange. Pupils suddenly talk like robots and do weird things - even Dinah finds herself acting oddly. She's sure the headmaster has some kind of power over them, and is determined to find out more. But the Demon Headmaster is equally determined to stop her. * Gillian Cross has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children's Novel Award, and the Smarties Prize, and is a highly-acclaimed author. Sales of her books exceed one million copies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175693 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

A pretty good pre-teen kids story - tense & interesting rather than scary
First published in 1982, this book reads a bit like a cross between Enid Blyton's secret seven and the My parents are aliens TV series, except that here the very odd characters are at school rather than at home. Dinah has just moved to a new foster home where the incumbent boys (particularly older brother Lloyd) are very suspicious of her. Perhaps with good reason, as from the very first day at her new school, Dinah can see that something is horribly wrong. All the schoolchildren are just too perfectly behaved, and her free-thinking step-brothers are being excluded and treated as trouble-makers. And before long, the Headmaster asks to see Dinah....

My son (10) is really enjoying me reading this book to him at bedtime (at 160 pages it is taking a while). We started off with the Puffin edition and then bought this edition when the library recalled it. We were disappointed that, unlike the Puffin version, this book has no illustrations (and the front cover is a bit bland compared to the traditional cover image of the Demon Headmasters face - but then in a way the old cover gave away a lot of the plot). But the story reads well enough without line drawings, and we have now bought all the other five books in this series : The Demon Headmaster and the Prime Minister's Brain, The revenge of the Demon Headmaster, The Demon Headmaster takes over, The Demon Headmaster strikes again, and Facing the Demon Headmaster. They must be read in order to make sense of what is going on.

Some of the language in Demon Headmaster seems dated, mainly Lloyd's food related exclamations, which make it read very much like a 1950s Enid Blyton book (no bad thing - and my sons often laughs out loud at his expressions). But it's a well crafted story that kept my son's attention throughout, and, although tense in places, it's surprisingly non-scary considering the plot-line. Unlike his favourite AstroSaurs and Captain Underpants books, this book is probably more girl friendly as well. Just a shame the excellent TV series isn't available on DVD at the moment to compliment this very good book (aimed at 7-12s I would say). It just loses a star as we missed the illustrations of the Puffin version.

the demon headmaster
Even though I'm probably not in the intended age range for this book now, I was when I first read it. And it makes a very entertaining read even now!! The 'us against them' type story appeals to kids between about 7 / 13. I'm not sure when it was written, but parts of it (language used, specifically) haven't aged all that well. I would reccomend it for children, definitely.

The Demon Headmaster
Harvey and Lloyd are two brothers whose parents foster a girl called Dinah. When they find out about this they flip! When Dinah arrives she is so excited about going to school the next day. However, when she arrives at school she is surprised to see all the other pupils are so well behaved and she can't figure out why. Then, when she goes to assembly she figures out that the headmaster hypnotises people!!! Harvey, Lloyd and some other children who are unable to be hypnotised form a group to find out how and why the headmaster does it.

One day the headmaster tells the children that they are going to be on The Eddy Hair TV Show. Harvey, Lloyd and Dinah don't understand why he wants to do this until they realise that at the end of the show, the winning team's headmaster gets one minute to talk to the nation. The children figure out he's going to try to hypnotise the whole nation. Will he succeed? Read the book to find out.

This is a great book and I would recommend it to anyone who likes scary stories or stories about school.