Undercover Knight: Attack of the Underwear Dragon by Scott Rothman

Cole had always wanted to be an assistant to Sir Percival. So he wrote a letter of application.

DEAR SIR PERCIVAL, I WOULD MAKE A GREAT ASSISTANT KNIGHT BECAUSE I AM SMART, I WORK HARD AND I PROMISE TO LEARN WHATEVER I DON'T KNOW.

PLEASE GIVE ME A SHOT.

Cole's letter moves Sir Percival to tears--which was really not all that hard, since Sir Percival cried when he peeled onions, when his feelings were hurt by callous wizards, and especially when he had to fight the Underwear Dragon.

But he hires Cole, who undergoes strenuous training. He has to learn how to to ride a charger (and fall off one), how to sharpen Sir Percival's swords, spears, and pencils, and how to sooth Sir Percy when he has nightmares about facing the Underwear Dragon. He has to master knightly courage when he is knocked off a horse...,

... KNOCKED OUT BY A PRINCESS, KNOCKED DOWN BY A KNIGHT, AND KNOCKED OUT BY A CATAPULT.

At last Cole is knighted by his hero, Sir Percival, and only just in time.

The Underwear Dragon, wearing impeccable whitey tighties, appears and destroys the whole kingdom and defeats all the knights--even the (sometimes) gallant Sir Percival.

Cole is the last man standing! The Underwear Dragon is prepared to eat him up!

BUT COLE REMEMBERED EVERYTHING HE HAD LEARNED!

Cole loaded his catapult and knocked the pants off the Underwear Dragon, who became the Embarrassed Bare-Naked Dragon and flew away forever.

It's happy ever after in the court of King Arthur, in Scott Rothman's Attack of the Underwear Dragon (Random House, 2020), a new tale in the comic mode of the bungling knight and his courageous young squire, illustrated humorously by Pete Oswald, the noted illustrator of Jory Johns' humorous hits, The Good Egg, The Couch Potato, The Bad Seed, and other comic treats. (see reviews here.)

A Slackard's Comeuppance, Or..., Schnitzel: A Cautionary Tale for Lazy Louts by Stephanie Shaw

I am Apprentice Schnitzel.
I serve Sir Willibald.
His wizardry was world-renowned
and I was quite enthralled.

But Sir Willibald is a strict taskmaster, and young Schnitzel, an self-admitted lazy layabout, secretly schemes to find ways around his graven-in-stone edict declared in somber tone:

"Clean the house and leave the spells alone!"

Still Schnitzel dreams of finding an easy way out of his tasks as he snoozes on the stairs he is sent to scour.

But his most appalling task is vacuuming the sorcerers castle. The vacuum cleaner is a beast--really a beast with long, sticky, purple tentacles that he fears with suck him into it bulging, striped maw.

But then one night a fancy-dressed but fanged gentlemen sounds the bell and greet Schnitzel with an offer he can't refuse!

"Allow me to demonstrate.
I'll finish in no time.
I'll do your work. You'll rest in peace,
And I won't charge a dime!"

And out of his portmanteau he pulls a vacuum cleaner of prodigious but fearful power. True, it sucks up dust from the floors and scarfs up cobwebs and mud clods from the carpets, but it also devours window drapes, the furniture, the floors, and chandeliers. the dishes and the sink...

It even ate the garbage,
Leaving nothing but the stink.

In fact, the sleazy salesman can't seem to control his own apparatus, and it continues its suction until the wizard's residence vanishes into it with a whish!

But then, Willibald the Wizard appears with a providential ...

POOF!

Failing to follow the instructions has consequences, as this sorcerer's apprentice learns his lesson:

When it comes to your work, it's best not to shirk!

You'll rue the day you tried to take the easy way, in Stephanie Shaw's retelling, Schnitzel: A Cautionary Tale for Lazy Louts (Sleeping Bear Press). Based on Goethe's famous work from 1789, this story has been reworked over the past centuries. Most kids are familiar with the section from Disney's classic film, Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse inadvertently creates a magic broom to help him carry water and floods the sorcerer's castle when he doesn't know how to make it stop, but this trope of the runaway device had found its place in cartoon, films, and stories all over the world. The illustrations of Kevin M. Barry, done in sinuous and slightly sinister gray line with clever touches of color, portray the traditional character with great humor. For another comic retelling, try Tomie De Paola's Caldecott-winning classic, Strega Nona, in which her hapless helper Big Anthony practically buries the village with the output of her magic pasta pot. Booklist recommends one of literature's classic cautionary tales in this fine spoof, saying, "Shaw warns readers of the perils of laziness in this retelling of Goethe's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, while Barry sets the eerie, Gothic mood with his Gorey-esque, watercolor-and-ink illustrations."

Bogles Outmanned! The Last Bogler by Catherine Jinks

All at once Alfred’s voice hailed them, echoing up from the chamber beneath their feet. “Are you there, Mr. Wardle?”

“I am, Mr. Bunce.”

“Could you send them lads down? And I’ll have me sack along with ’em.”

“Yes, of course.” As Ned picked up Alfred’s sack, Mr. Wardle cleared his throat and added, “I take it you’ve found something of interest?”

“Oh, aye. This here is a bogle’s lair, make no mistake.” Alfred appeared suddenly at the foot of the stairs, his lantern raised, his long face grim. “What I don’t know is how many of ’em might be a-lurking down here. For I ain’t never seen no den more suited to a bogle’s taste, nor better laid out for the trapping o’ children. If you ask me, Mr. Wardle, there’s more’n three kids has met their doom in this rat’s nest.”

And he motioned to Ned, who reluctantly clumped downstairs with Alfred’s sack on his shoulder.

With two of Alfred Bunce's former apprentices now gone to join the bright lights of London's theatrical life, Ned is left as the "Go-Devil Man's" last bogle-bait. What he lacks in the lark-like singing voice of Birdie and the quick, acrobatic feet of Jem, the stolid Ned makes up for in his rock-solid courage and loyalty to the bogler who has saved him from the murderous hands of Sarah Pickles, who fed the babies of working mothers to bogles, and Salty-Jack, who is the underlord of the area around Newgate Prison and who has vowed to see them both dead.

But Bunce's solitary bogling trade is becoming a public utility, thanks to the plague of bogles drawn by Sarah Pickles to the central sewers around Newgate. With the knowledgeable folklorist Miss Edith Eames and city engineer Mr. Harewood, Alfred and his apprentices join officials of the Water Works in a secret association, the Committee for the Regulation of Subterranean Anomalies. Made believers in what was formerly held as ignorant superstition, the powers that be are now aware of what lurks in the underground passages of London's water, steam, and sewer system, the slithering shape-changing bogles with an insatiable taste for the flesh of young children. More and more, they seek a final solution, some form of mass extermination for the bogle plague that continues to seize children from privy, cellar drain, and chimney alike all over London.

Little-spoken but stalwart Alfred Bunce, with his circles of salt and his poisoned blackthorn spear, realizes that the success of the Committee would put an end to his livelihood, but he joins with them in their search for a way to a permanent solution to the grisly deaths of so many children. Out of loyalty to Mr. Bunce, Ned, who has little taste for the dangerous and disgusting work of bogle-killing, invariably ending with an explosion of black ectoplasmic goo, follows him into underground London, more fascinated by the steamworks and the gearing of great machines of the engineers below ground than his hair-raising job as bogler's boy. The Committee plans the great invasion of the bogles' underground lair using steam flushing and flash powder to drive them out of their weirs to be killed by a phalanx of bogle-spearing engineers, But Salty-Jack appears for one last deadly showdown with Ned and Alfred, this time high above ground in the heights of Christopher Wren's tower monument to the Great Fire of London.

In an appropriately rip-roaring conclusion to the third book in her trilogy, How to Catch A Bogle series,  forthcoming today The Last Bogler (How to Catch a Bogle) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), author Catherine Jinks brings it all together, her intricately drawn Dickensian characters, the deliciously delineated London setting on the cusp of transition from superstition to modernity so well portrayed in the metaphor of a changing underground London, and her rich, many-faceted storytelling that can't be beat. Rare enough is an author who can so realistically create a historical setting such as the mean streets of the Victorian city (see her glossary of underclass slang appended) and its proper-mannered society and yet blend it all with a fantastical thread of that society's dark and dangerous underbelly, the sewers and dark passages of underground London. Catherine Jinks does it all with writing that accrues suspense carefully and deliberately toward thrills and chills that keep the most reluctant reader enthralled.

And just as Dickens would have done, Jinks builds to a rousing happy ending, with young apprentices Birdie, Jem, and now Ned on their way to well-foreshadowed and prosperous futures in a bogle-free London and a well-earned retirement for the good bogler Alfred Bunce, an ending that leaves the reader both satisfied and yet sad to turn the last page on this masterfully entertaining series.

Read my earlier reviews of the first two books here.