Dragon Slayers' Academy: Strange Mix of Modern and Arthurian

The Dragon Slayers' Academy (aka DSA) series by Kate McMullan has an unusual vocabulary. It has the characters sometimes using modern day words and phrases and at other times saying things like "Be gone, varlet!"

The names chosen for the characters range from the strange to the common too. There's Wiglaf (the main character), Eric (who is really Erica in disguise), Mordred (borrowed from somewhere I'm sure), Coach Plungett (Plunkett?), Yorick (borrowed from somewhere I'm sure), Brother Dave (who speaks in King James English), and more.

I read the first two books in the series: The New Kid at School and Revenge of the Dragon Lady. Both had an identical "DSA Yearbook" as the last ~20 pages of the book. Each book (the story part) was 90 pages long. I'm guessing the others in the series unnecessarily have that Yearbook at the end too. It's simply a map of the DSA and character sketches of the main participants.

In each of these two books, the hero (Wiglaf) manages to "slay" a dragon without ever having to kill one outright. In the first book, he slays one by telling it bad jokes. In the second, the dragon dies when it accidentally takes a "bath" in the castle moat. I'm guessing that similar things happen in the other books as well.

These books should be an easy read for 3rd graders. Many will probably not find them all that interesting though. Boys would probably like them more than girls. But all this is generalizing and conjecture.

They are not high on my recommendation list, but I wouldn't recommend against them either. (Can you say, "Waffle"?)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid & Dork Diaries: Same Book, Different Gender

As I read these kids' book series in alphabetical order, it just so happens that Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries are next to each other in my list.

That's probably a good thing because they are essentially the same book (I read the original in each series.) which makes it easy to compare them to each other.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid was published 2 years before Dork Diaries and is the better series (again, based my reading on just one book of each).

The wimpy kid in the title is pretty much a wimpy kid. He's a young lad in middle school. The dork isn't really a dork. She's pretty much a drama queen - though not the most dramatic one I've ever seen.

Since both are "handwritten" in diary style, there's not usually much printing on a page, especially when there's artwork. So you can read them rather quickly.

The Dork book has many dated (2009-ish) cultural references that don't make it quite as pertinent to youngsters even today, just 8 years later. Wimpy Kid avoids most, if not all, such references making it more timeless.

Both made it to the New York Times best seller list, which doesn't surprise me. I'm not sure Dork really deserves to be thought of as such a book.

Crispin: How Old Is This Kid?

Crispin: The Cross of Lead is the first in a trilogy of books about Crispin by Avi (Edward Wortis). The other two books are entitled Crispin: At the Edge of the World and Crispin: The End of Time.

I really enjoyed this story. It was a real page-turner for me. I finished it much sooner than I had initially expected to.

Part of the reason is that I like stories of jolly old England - in most cases, the older, the better. In this case, the time is 1377 near or just after the time the Plague struck the English countryside.

Crispin, or Asta's son, as he's known for the first several chapters, is the main character, but it's his friend, Bear, who's pretty much the hero. It's Bear, a very large man, who kills the bad guy in the end. (Sorry, no spoiler alerts here.)

Crispin is a 13-year-old boy who knows virtually nothing but subsistence living. It sometimes feels like he's only 7 or 8 as the story progresses. It's not that he's stupid. He just has zero experience with almost anything.

Fortunately for himself and Bear, he does learn quickly.

One other feature of this book that I especially liked - and one that would make it good for children - is that Avi uses archaic words from time to time and often explains them. At least, in the beginning he explains them. When he uses new old terms later on, he doesn't, but it makes you want to look them up to see what they mean, if you can't figure them out from the context - which sometimes you simply can't.