MEASLE AND THE DRAGODON

Hopping aboard the bandwagon behind its predecessor, Measle and the Wrathmonk (2004), this Brit-flavored burlesque pits young Measle Stubbs and his doughty little dog Tinker against a crew of wildly inept wrathmonks, or wizards-gone-to-the-bad, led by the last of the dragon-riding, long-ago-defeated Dragondons. Measle’s Mom being a rare reservoir of magical “mana,” the Dragodon has her snatched, intending to use her power to raise up his immense, dormant dragon and escape his underground prison. Pocketing some magic jellybeans, off hies Measle to the rescue, led by a convenient clue to a shutdown amusement park where drawn-out, increasingly large-scale chases and battles await, before the requisite escape and the dealing out of appropriate comeuppances. Thickly padded with repetitive slapstick scenes of the cardboard villains displaying their stupidity and explaining their intentions at length, this pedestrian knockoff makes stale reading next to the better imagined fantasies of Debi Gliori, Lemony Snicket, or just about anyone else. (Fantasy. 10-12)