MULROX AND THE MALCOGNITOS

An ogre poet embarks on a quest to save his lively bad ideas from a monster in this debut children’s novel.

Mulrox is not your typical ogre. He’s scrawny, and worse, he loves poetry more than smashing things. All in all, he’s a huge disappointment to his Great-Aunt Griselda, who’s an ogre’s ogre. After breaking a hip in a roof-stomping accident, she has taken over Mulrox’s bedroom—and now threatens to take over his house. He can stop her, she says, only by winning an upcoming talent competition; Mulrox accepts the challenge but is full of self-doubt, never satisfied with his own work. On top of that, a squirrelmonk has a message for him: “Events are in motion….It can’t be helped. You’ll just have to do your best.” His destiny, it seems, is to help a swarm of malcognitos—his own bad ideas come to life—defeat the Vaccus, their enemy and the embodiment of writer’s block. But first, they must find the portal to Sounous, the malcognitos’ home, and that won’t be easy, even with Mulrox’s eccentric neighbor Yahgurkin tagging along to help. In her book, Smith demonstrates the same love of words that characterizes Mulrox. Her wonderfully expressive, inventive vocabulary resembles that in Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), with an ogre flavor all its own. The story thinks through its mythology in compelling ways, as when Sounous, the land of ideas both good and bad, is described as a “magnificent palace with a thatched roof and wooden door. Everyone should be interested in it.” Because the novel presents itself as a portal/quest story, readers will likely expect the real adventure to begin after the portal is found—but that doesn’t happen until well over two-thirds of the way through, making the pace feel off.

An original and witty adventure that celebrates the imagination.