NO ONE LIKES A BURP

Gassy friends save the day in this follow-up to No One Likes a Fart (2019).

BFFs Burp and Fart—clouds rendered, respectively, in hues of purple and brown—float about, offending everyone with their pungent odors. Burp begins to feel bad about that, so she rolls around in flower petals. That doesn’t help; a young couple still turn up their noses when she wafts by. On her way back to Fart, Burp’s smell drives off some bullies who are tormenting a smaller girl. Burp tells Fart about it, and they decide to don capes and become superheroes. When they see a crook (wearing a mask and a black-and-white outfit) stealing a car, they float into the car and stink him out. They continue to do super-stinky good deeds until they find a kindergarten in danger of being crushed by a falling tree in a storm. They try to evacuate the building, but they aren’t stinky enough. (The kids and teachers have smelled far worse.) Fart has a great idea: Get Sewage Gas to help. Sewie, who inexplicably speaks in broken English, gets everyone to leave and saves the day. Blake’s forced, flat fable of flatulence won’t inspire much tittering beyond the first toot. Nickel’s illustrations of humans of varying skin tones resemble Saturday morning cartoons, but the speech bubbles, full of attempted potty humor, add little. Most readers will wish this Australian import had stayed Down Under like the emissions that inspired it.

An unnecessary stink-quel.