Brock the Croc: Make It Snappy!

By Adrian Beck & Dean Rankine

Reviewed by Lara Cain Gray

Brock the Croc: Make It Snappy! is the second instalment of an action-packed series written by Adrian Beck and illustrated by Dean Rankine – both prolific and popular Australian creators. It is aimed at readers 6 to 12 years, crossing junior fiction and middle grade, and cleverly deploys a range of story devices to engage this wide and varied target age range. Readers will find it so lively and silly, packed with humour and ridiculous over the top twists, that they might not even notice that it strongly prioritises decodable language, thus supporting reading acquisition at a variety of ages.

The story follows Brock, a motorbike-riding, guitar-shredding crocodile, as he faces off against the robotic menace Gruntzilla, sent by the villainous Mayor Grunter. With her sidekick, Slim Jim, the greedy mayor plans to turn Brock’s beloved swamp into a concrete jungle. Can Brock dig deep, fight back and lead the Swamp Gang to victory? Can he truly become the living legend he’s (humbly) always wanted to be?

The narrative carries themes of environmental protection, teamwork and leadership, friendship and resilience. There are also robots, skateboards, explosions, fart jokes and a completely unreconstructed villain who gets her just desserts. Witty asides, ‘dad jokes’ and visual gags punctuate every page. This won’t appeal to all readers (or their gatekeepers) but for many in the ‘reluctant reader’ space, this will hold strong appeal for fast-paced laughs.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just ‘one of those’ cheap laugh books that parents and teachers sometimes refuse to view as ‘real reading’. For example, character names – Brock the Croc, Mayor Grunter and her Grunt-Bots, Slim Jim, and Chazz the dog, are all decodable words (that is, words that can be sounded out, with few tricky silent letters). Throughout the book, careful vocabulary selections have been made – Brock ‘zooms fast’ and the Grunt-bots ‘zip’ and ‘shatter’ – presenting a range of phonetic reading practice opportunities. The book also employs a lot of repetition, and then throws in challenge words for interest. Combined with Rankine’s comic-style illustrations (which have stylistic echoes of his work on franchises like The Simpsons and Rick & Morty) these books may be really useful in catch up clubs or with diverse readers in the middle grade years who need support in reading fluency.

With its mix of humour, action, and accessible language, Make It Snappy! is a fantastic choice for developing readers who want an exciting, confidence-boosting story.

Larrikin House 2025

Adrian Beck

Dean Rankine

Lara Cain Gray is the author of The Grown-Ups Guide to Picture Books