The Wizards and the Monster

Grade 3-5?Warhola's slobbering green dragon on the dust jacket and pencil illustrations throughout are the brightest aspect of this rather colorless story. Best friends Becky and Simon, fifth graders, are instructed by the principal to look after their substitute teacher, a frail, bespectacled old man named Mr. Merlin. Before recess is over, the kids end up in a medieval castle and must call upon their wits to avoid being whipped for their insolence. Unfortunately, their wits are weak and Brittain's puns fair no better than Sir Prize and Sir Render. Simon refuses to become the king's permanent wizard ("...mom and dad would be real sore if I didn't show up for supper tonight"), and Becky interprets feminism as whopping the tar out of a dragon and maybe out of the chauvinistic king, too. The story moves quickly, the plot is simple, the outcome anticlimactic, and the adventure nonthreatening. This hero and heroine aren't as clever as the guys in Jon Scieszka's Knights of the Kitchen Table (Viking, 1991).?John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TX
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