Just So Stories

Harper Collins Australia

September 2026

• Imprint: ABC Books AU
• ISBN: 9780733342073
• RRP: $16.99

Why yes I sure did love Duck #1 and now #2 certainly hasn’t diminished that. The humour that Matt inserts into all his work, along with his perfectly pithy and often pointed cartoons throughout is just exactly what kids want to see. And it’s not just your keen readers who eat these up but your less enthusiastic ones, or the ones that find a whole novel rather daunting will pick one up and see the format, read a cartoon and laugh a lot, then read a little more until – well, look at that! read the whole book!

Duck and Mouse, along with Big Dog and others in the quirky animal population of their town are concerned, and rightly so, about that hipster creep Eon’s sinister brainwashing of the people via the soothing subliminal podcast he has oozing through their earbuds constantly. It’s so bad, that everything in the town is in a kind of torpor.

Duck is not going to let this happen and he realises that with the advent of the earbud technology, he will need technology to fight back so it’s a repurpose of all the old now-abandoned radios in town and providing animals with these so that he and Mouse can rally the animal troops via their own radio talkback program. Yes, they do still have control of the town radio, thanks to some cooperative bird friends. Eon must be stopped! And Duck, along with his stalwart animal cohort, can do it.

One of the things I love most about Matt’s comedic writing is that underneath the laughs are some genuinely thought-provoking themes. At the moment, for example, with the threats AI is posing to the very fabric of human society, the pervasiveness and the mind-controlling aspects of technology are a hot topic. So while this hilarious book might provide some wonderful light relief as a class serial read, it can – and I would say should – be the provocation for some much deeper conversations on the value of technology and harnessing it for the greater good, not for the downfall of humanity.

You know you’ll need more than one copy of this one because as with all of Matt’s books, it will be in hot demand. It was such a pleasure to finally meet Matt F2F recently and totally confirmed my take on him as being such a stand up guy passionate about kids reading, the kids’ lit industry in Australia, libraries and librarians and giving kids our best. It’s a feathers flying 5 🦆🐭📻🐶☕rating for readers from around Year 3 upwards.