BEWARE THE DRAGON AND THE NOZZLEWOCK by Vikram Madan gets a starred Kirkus review

A new gathering of hazards and cautions in rollicking verse from the author of Hatful of Dragons (2020).

A dragon smart enough to see through a knight’s “I DO NOT seek your gold!” might seem fearful enough. But Madan’s collection of poetry, presented in comics format, features plenty of formidable characters, from the boneless “Squishosaurs” (“We glide across the countryside / And in our viscous wake, / The T. Rexes trudge terrified, / Velociraptors quake!”) to a young witch with a lucrative line of ghost pets. Perhaps worst of all is the Nozzlewock, which writhes its way into several poems to suck up the unwary with its prodigious proboscis: “Beware the Nozzlewock, my child! / The nose with super-vacuum strength!” Sharp-eyed readers will find further visual links between various poems, as when a janitor’s “Little Oopsie” in a secret laboratory that “messed up time and space” goes on to turn a young explorer into a flaming “super-gal.” In varied but consistently tight verses accompanying expressive cartoon images depicting a diverse cast, Madan also trots in other memorable fancies, from a theatrical chorus line of grown-ups singing away a beleaguered child’s “Bad-Luck Bogeys” to a mummy happily joining a zombie rock band called the Rolling Moans, on the way to a gloriously glutinous finale in which a group of intrepid children tickle the Nozzlewock into a mighty sneeze of its own.

Juicy, joyful, and just right for reading aloud, too.