If you make the shop keeper Pakistani, there is suddenly an entire minefield of racist tropes out there you will probably blunder into, but you probably were coming from a heart-in-the-right-place of wanting more diversity in the first place. If you just make the shop keeper white, you have a lack of diversity in your books, but people might not see it. It feels like one of those baby-steps problems. Still, hypocrisy smells and should be punished). Raj the shop owner is annoying when he tries to sell you too many things, but is basically a Good Egg, and indeed it is his sharp eye that saves the day at the end of the book ( although he does it by outing another cross dresser, so they can blackmail him, which is. But when the fat boy asks the hero on a date, it is shown as a good thing that they call him by his real name and not his nickname and turn him down gently. It's doesn't feel like it's done cruelly though. It is 'not glamourous' that Dennis's dad drives a lorry of bog rolls to Doncaster. There is a strongly-coded-as-pakistani shop keeper (called Raj, wife wears a sari, dark skinned in the illustrations) who is always trying to sell more things with ridiculous offers.

There is a fat character at school who the kids call 'Big Mac and Chips', and the joke is that he is on a diet because he's eating a huge pile of junk food, but diet coke. So what is my take-home? Well, a bit of this, a bit of that. I also like having opinions on internet controversies, so after Jack Munroe's rant about the racism and classism and body shaming, I had another reason to read these. I like children's books, so not having read David Walliams was a large gap.

The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams