Clara’s Verdict
Katie Kirby has found, in Lottie Brooks, a voice that speaks directly and honestly to pre-teen readers about the experience of being twelve in a way that manages to be simultaneously embarrassing, funny, and deeply reassuring. Lottie Brooks’s Totally Disastrous School-Trip is the fourth book in the series, and it maintains everything that has made Lottie such a reliable companion: the mortification, the friendship drama, the occasional triumph, all rendered in prose that knows exactly who it’s talking to.
Charlie Sanderson’s narration has become as definitive to this series as any element of the writing itself. This is a series I recommend unhesitatingly to parents and teachers looking for audiobooks that genuinely engage reluctant listeners, and Book 4 gives them no reason to stop.
About the Audiobook
Lottie is heading on a week-long residential school trip – a whole week away from embarrassing parents and her little brother Toby’s antisocial habits. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The other girls at the camp are comprehensively horrible. Best friend Jess has discovered a new friend called Isha and is spending all her time with her. And then Lottie’s diary gets stolen – which, in the context of Lottie’s life, is approximately the worst thing that could happen, given what’s written in it.
Kirby is skilled at capturing the particular social intensity of early adolescence – the way a week away from home can feel simultaneously terrifying and liberating, the way friendships shift and re-form under pressure, the way small embarrassments take on catastrophic proportions in the moment even as they become good stories later. The school trip setting is a perfect pressure cooker for Lottie’s brand of disaster, and Kirby makes excellent use of it.
What the series does that many of its contemporaries don’t is treat its protagonist’s feelings as genuinely valid rather than comedically excessive. Lottie’s anxieties are real anxieties; her humiliations are real humiliations. The comedy comes from recognition, not from condescension. That’s a more sophisticated approach to the preteen voice than it might appear, and it’s why readers in the target age group connect so strongly with these books.
This is Book 4 of the Lottie Brooks series, published by Penguin Audio in July 2023, running to 5 hours and 48 minutes.
The Narration
Charlie Sanderson has narrated the Lottie Brooks series throughout, and the consistency matters enormously in a series like this – young listeners form strong attachments to a narrator’s voice, and Sanderson has made Lottie’s voice entirely her own. She captures the character’s breathless drama, sudden descents into despair, and equally sudden recoveries with precision. The pace is lively throughout, well-suited to the audience this book is aimed at.
Under six hours makes this very manageable for family car journeys or for children listening independently at bedtime. The length is one of the series’ practical virtues – long enough to feel satisfying, short enough to feel achievable even for reluctant readers.
What Readers Say
The audiobook holds a 4.7 rating on Audible UK. UK readers have been particularly enthusiastic, with multiple parents reporting daughters who “devoured” the book in a single sitting or over two evenings, often giggling audibly. One parent described their reluctant reader daughter finishing 100 pages in one night and declaring it “the best book ever” – which, for anyone who has tried to get a twelve-year-old to read willingly, is rather remarkable testimony.
“Daughter loves these books, wizzes though them, often laughing out loud,” wrote one parent. Another described giving the book as a birthday present, saying it was “fantastic to watch her engaged in these books and see smiles when she reads an amusing part.” One young reviewer pleaded directly with Kirby to write another book because they were “running out of books to read” – a problem most of us would be glad to have.
Who Should Listen?
It’s also worth noting the particular value of this series for reluctant readers – not just reluctant listeners. The Lottie Brooks books have converted multiple children from people who resisted reading to people who demand more books, and the audiobook format offers a useful gateway: it provides the story in a format that requires no sustained visual attention, lowering the resistance barrier whilst delivering the narrative pleasure that, once experienced, tends to generate its own appetite for more. If you have a child who says they don’t like reading, trying this audiobook is a lower-stakes proposition than insisting on the physical book.
Girls aged 9 to 13, primarily, though Lottie’s voice is universal enough that older teenagers occasionally enjoy the series with nostalgia, and parents sometimes report finding themselves equally entertained. Ideal for school-holiday listening or as a wind-down before bed. If your child has enjoyed Dork Diaries, Wimpy Kid, or anything in the Jacqueline Wilson catalogue, they’ll find Lottie immediately recognisable and warmly welcome.
Find Lottie Brooks’s Totally Disastrous School-Trip on Audible UK. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
