It's Mine! The Tooth Fairy Wars by Kate Coombs

WHEN NATHAN LOST HIS FIRST TOOTH, HIS MOTHER TOLD HIM TO PUT IT UNDER HIS PILLOW.

"THE TOOTH FAIRY WILL COME GET IT AND SHE'LL LEAVE YOU A DOLLAR!"

"I DON'T WANT TO!" SAID NATHAN.

"IT'S MY TOOTH AND I'M GOING TO KEEP IT FOREVER!"

Nathan's mom is fine with that. After all, Nathan and his tooth go way back.

But even though he providently tucks his first lost tooth away in a baggie among his socks, the next morning it's gone and an unwanted dollar is there in its place.

HEY! thinks Nathan. Who's in charge here?

It's a matter of principal to tooth-fairy contrarian Nathan. They are HIS baby teeth and he can keep them if he wants to.

GAME ON!

But the Tooth Fairy proves to be no pantie-waist pixie! She's a professional, with a cast-iron hairdo and top-secret lost-tooth-locating technology--the Sensomatic Tooth Finder--on her side. Nathan hides his next lost tooth under military guard by a squadron of toy soldiers. But the Tooth Fairy's quick-response team extracts it easily, leaving her marker behind again. The Tooth Fairy War escalates as Nathan disguises his next tooth under a coat of gray paint and leaves it under guard in his pet tarantula's cagem, which hardly deters the Enchanted Commerce League from doing tooth retrieval duty. Nathan raises the ante, with a lost tooth coated in honey to lure the Fairy's minions and itching powder to deter their return.

This is serious! Who will be the first to throw in the tooth towel?

Kate Coombs' The Tooth Fairy Wars (Atheneum Press, 2014) fashions a spoof of a beating-the-bureaucracy fantasy around the what-if? premise of a strong-willed baby-tooth collector out to beat tradition. But die-hard Nathan has plans for those teeth, and readers will giggle at the details of his plan to defeat a different sort of super-hero tooth fairy. Jake Parker's comic illustrations pit two determined and worth opponents against each other in a battle of wit against magic that will conjure up quite a few snickers among the missing-tooth crowd.