GYRO AND THE ARGONAUTS! AKA THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN*

A young fanboy learns that his heroes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when he joins Perseus and other Argonauts on a quest for the Golden Sheep.

A fixation on the “horse apples”—what the narrator calls “my adorable nickname for horse poops”—of winged Pegasus isn’t all that drags down this effort at role reversal. Pruett sends white-presenting 12-year-old Gyro, who’s been named an “Honorary Indemnified Argonaut,” off with Heracles—here a brawny (and dimwitted) woman with disgusting personal habits—and chiseled narcissist Perseus on a mission to slay monsters and rescue a magical ram. But in contrast to these supposed heroes, all the monsters Gyro encounters, from Medusa and the Minotaur to the Cyclops, turn out to be victims of fake news spread by lying storytellers, and more interested in leading quiet lives than eating people. Along with being a miasma of labored fart jokes and potty humor, the narrative is studded with words like LΛBΨ℞ΦΠTH and TΩDΔΨ that inconsistently use letters misappropriated from the Greek alphabet. Improbably surviving multiple tricks and betrayals by his supposed allies, Gyro does ultimately get from “monster-fighter” to “monster-friender” in time for a climactic (and nearly bloodless) battle that leaves him “better than a hero.” Confusingly, in several first-person interludes that directly address readers, the narrator is a self-described “third-person omniscient narrator” but doesn’t define the term or clarify that it refers to the rest of the book.

A solid base buried beneath a heaping helping of horse apples.