Locked Up! (Worst Pets Ever #1) by Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove

Title: Locked Up! (Worst Pets Ever #1)

Author: Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove

Genre: Humour

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st November 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 128

Price: $15.99

Synopsis: Captain Fluffykins, Nickers and Brutus are the newest recruits locked up at the Worst Pets Ever Obedience School. There are so many rules! The daily schedule is a nightmare. The teachers are terrible. Don’t even mention the food! And the other students are all kinds of disturbing. The only option for the trio is to team up and make a great escape!

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You’re read Worst Week Ever…now get ready for Worst Pets Ever! Justin Chase has been put through the wringer, now it’s his pets’ turn! Join Captain Fluffykins, Nickers and Brutus as they embark on their time at the Worst Pets Ever Obedience School. It’s a place where people send their dogs, cats, fish, hamsters, llamas, alpacas and rabbits when the pets are behaving very badly. Very, very BADLY! In fact, you have never seen a group of pets with worse behaviour!

But that’s nothing. Poor Captain Fluffykins has to share a room with Nickers and Brutus, a pampered dog with bad behaviour, and the food is awful. Ugh! Then there’s the daily schedule of…well, things that Captain Fluffykins would rather not do.

But alas, Trainer Trina and Trainer Travis are determined to get the pets moving and working on their behaviour to become the most perfectly behaved pets in the world. Angelic, pure and an utter delight to be around. If only…

In the first book in Matt and Eva’s new stories takes the diabolical pets from the Worst Week Ever series and plonks them into a high security training facility. Justin has his turn, and now it’s time for the pets to get a taste of revenge. It’s time for the pets to be humiliated! It’s nice to see Justin getting a break as well.

But Captain Fluffykins, Nickers, and Brutus are determined to break free from their temporary prison, and there’s only one way to do it. Team up with brains, brawn and gullibility to try and break out, get home and away from the terrible trainers, appalling food and restrictive rules. Of course, in Matt and Eva don’t ever make anything easy for their characters, and there are various obstacles thrown up that seem ridiculous but work so well for this book. Everything in it suits the tone perfectly and will delight younger readers. They get the perfect balance between various kinds of humour kids enjoy and a few nods that adult readers reading this with younger readers will appreciate.

It’s a great book for kids starting to read independently, but also one that will be lots of fun for parents to read with their kids. I loved reading this and found it such fun. It’s the ridiculousness of some of what happens that truly make this a fun novel. Because it’s things that wouldn’t really happen but that we can imagine happening if we let our pets loose to do whatever they wanted (even the naked cats).

It’ll be fun to see where this series goes next!