Nick’s great quest to “fight” a dragon is more buildup than story.
A fierce dragon needs slaying, and young knight Nick’s determined to do it.
It seems Nick is “dying to fight a real dragon.” (The text sporadically breaks into bold and italicized type with little apparent logic.) The dragon he has chosen is Breakhorn, which has been bedeviling the village at the base of the snow-capped mountain where the dragon lives. Young Nick makes his quest and confronts this great red beast armed with such a rinky-dink sword that Breakhorn refuses to engage, so the villagers equip him with a proper one, and back up the mountain he goes with a sword three times his height, but now he has no shield….Down and up, down and up Nick goes, till finally he has sword and shield and is wearing a practically immobilizing suit of armor. Turns out Breakhorn never wanted to fight in the first place: “I prefer talking or playing games.” Chess, for instance, at which Nick is quite good. “And that’s how our little knight defeated a dragon after all.” Although the conceit is cute, the text seems to get as tired as Nick with all the to-ing and fro-ing. Dijkstra paints a charming, medieval European village whose residents are all white, as is Nick, and a great, red dragon that looks rather like a benevolent Smaug.
Nick’s great quest to “fight” a dragon is more buildup than story. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60537-274-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clavis
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound.
The titular cookie runs off the page at a bookstore storytime, pursued by young listeners and literary characters.
Following on 13 previous How To Catch… escapades, Wallace supplies sometimes-tortured doggerel and Elkerton, a set of helter-skelter cartoon scenes. Here the insouciant narrator scampers through aisles, avoiding a series of elaborate snares set by the racially diverse young storytime audience with help from some classic figures: “Alice and her mad-hat friends, / as a gift for my unbirthday, / helped guide me through the walls of shelves— / now I’m bound to find my way.” The literary helpers don’t look like their conventional or Disney counterparts in the illustrations, but all are clearly identified by at least a broad hint or visual cue, like the unnamed “wizard” who swoops in on a broom to knock over a tower labeled “Frogwarts.” Along with playing a bit fast and loose with details (“Perhaps the boy with the magic beans / saved me with his cow…”) the author discards his original’s lip-smacking climax to have the errant snack circling back at last to his book for a comfier sort of happily-ever-after.
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7282-0935-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An immersive, charming read and convincing proof again that even small bodies can house stout hearts.
Can knightly deeds bring together a feathered odd couple who are on opposite daily schedules?
Having won over a dragon (and millions of fans) in the Caldecott Honor–winning Knight Owl (2022), the fierce yet impossibly cute nocturnal, armor-clad owlet faces a new challenge—sleep deprivation—in the wake of taking on Early Bird, a trainee who rises with the sun and chatters interminably: “I made pancakes! Do you like pancakes? I love pancakes! Where’s the syrup?” It’s enough to test the patience of even the knightliest of owls, and eventually Knight Owl explodes in anger. But although Early Bird is even smaller than her mentor, she turns out to be just as determined to achieve knighthood. After he tells her to leave, she acquits herself so nobly in a climactic encounter with a pack of wolves that she earns a place at the castle. Denise proves a dab hand at depicting genuinely slinky, scary wolves as well as slipping cheerfully anachronistic newspapers and other sight gags into his realistically wrought medieval settings to underscore the tale’s tongue-in-cheek tone. Better yet, a final view of the doughty duo sitting down together to a lavish pancake breakfast/dinner at dusk ends the episode in a sweet rush of syrup and bonhomie.
An immersive, charming read and convincing proof again that even small bodies can house stout hearts. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780316564526
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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