ONCE UPON A TIM

Thinking that it’s better to be fake knights than real peasants, Tim and his best buddy, Belinda, sign up to rescue a captured princess.

Unaware that they’ve been snookered into a dastardly scheme, the two youngsters hear that Princess Grace from the next kingdom over has been carried off in the claws of a fearsome and funky “stinx” and volunteer to accompany (reputedly) brave and noble Prince Ruprecht and his (reputedly) powerful magician Nerlim on a rescue mission. Accompanied by village idiot Ferkle, whose habit of shoving mud in his pants effectively lowers the level of humor even further, the two ersatz knights weather the Forest of Doom, the River of Doom, and a “troll bridge” across the Chasm of Doom despite a suspicious lack of assistance from either the prince or the magician…and arrive to discover that neither the stinx nor the princess is quite as expected either. In fact, the princess ends up being the rescuer (“That’s what you call irony,” she comments) when Ruprecht and Nerlim announce their intention to seize her and do away with any inconvenient witnesses. Tim and Belinda are rewarded with promotions for their efforts; readers will come away with both a cogent warning from Gibbs about the dangers of falling for fake news and better vocabularies due to his penchant for flagging significant words like gullible and malodorous in the narrative and then pausing to define and use them in sample sentences. Along with a full-spread map, Curtis supplies frequent pen-and-ink sketches of the cast in comical poses and straits. The races and ethnicities of the characters are not specified in the text, though cover art depicts characters of various skin tones.

Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing.