Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock booking

Vikram Madan lives in Seattle where he makes fun art and writes funny books including BEWARE THE DRAGON AND THE NOZZLEWOCK A Poetry Collection in a Graphic Novel format Coming Nov 2024 ages 7 12 ZOONI TALES Graphic Novel In Rhyme series 2 books Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections OWL PENGUIN Starter Graphic Novel Series 3 books 2023 Geisel Honor Book ALA Notable Childrens Book and Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection A HATFUL OF DRAGONS Funny Poetry Collection Selected as a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews New York Public Library Bank Street College of Education Denver Public Library School Library Journal Fuse 8 and others Finalist for Texas Bluebonnet South Dakota Prairie Bloom Vikram Madan lives in Seattle where he makes fun art and writes funny books including BEWARE THE DRAGON AND THE NOZZLEWOCK A Poetry Collection in a Graphic Novel format Coming Nov 2024 ages 7 12 ZOONI TALES Graphic Novel In Rhyme series 2 books Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections OWL PENGUIN Starter Graphic Novel Series 3 books 2023 Geisel Honor Book ALA Notable Children s Book and Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection A HATFUL OF DRAGONS Funny Poetry Collection Selected as a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews New York Public Library Bank Street College of Education Denver Public Library School Library Journal Fuse 8 and others Finalist for Texas Bluebonnet South Dakota Prairie Bloom State Awards ALA ALSC Reading Pick and recipient of a Kirkus Starred Review Visit site_link www. Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock epub reader com for a free educator s guide for this book THE BUBBLE COLLECTOR and LORD OF THE BUBBLES Funny Poetry Collections both winners of Moonbeam Book Awards for Children s Poetry BOBO PUP PUP Early Reader Series 4 books Recipient of a CCB Starred Review site_link Perfect for fans of Jack Prelutsky and Shel Silverstein award winning author Vikram Madan s new poetry collection features delicious vocabulary hilarious poems and a full color graphic novel format Vikram Madan packs this collection with whimsical stories told in rhyme surprise twist after surprise twist and a host of unusual characters In these pages you ll meet ghost guppies and the brave girl who creates them Stan the Slouching Man who ll teach you blackbelt slouching oozing dinosaurs called squishosaurs a suspicious dragon and the Nozzlewock a nose with super vacuum strength among many other memorable heroes Recurring characters and subplots in the art weave the poems together adding to the merriment This quirky collection in full color graphic novel format begs to be read over and over again Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock A Graphic Novel Poetry Collection Full of Surprising Characters Does poetry for kids sell It s an interesting question Let s scale it back a bit then and ask a simpler one Does poetry for kids sell in any month other than April a. Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock ebookers a Poetry Month Or even simpler does anyone but teachers buy works of children s poetry Does anyone but teachers seek out new poets rather than just grabbing some collection by Shel Silverstein I don t know the answer to these questions but I do know that when the publisher of Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock decided on how to sell this book they hit on a brilliant description The subtitle of this book reads A graphic novel poetry collection full of surprising characters And just the other day in my own library somebody asked if this book should be shelved in the graphic novel section or the poetry section Do you see what author illustrator Vikram Madan has done here He s managed to straddle the line between poetry and comics Poetry and comics for the record make for a perfect match with one another and any author artist who realizes that will be on the path to victory So I guess my answer to that first question I asked is yes poetry sells But you have to sell IT in turn baby Yeah you do. Beware the Dragon and the Nozzlewock kindle books Twenty five poems encapsulate this collection On the cover you ll see that the book promises to be Full of surprising characters and that is if anything underselling it Ghosts mummies dinosaurs green haired janitors smooth talking moose salesmen you name it they re here Along the way you ll encounter the dreaded nozzlewock as well Think of it like the Jabberwocky but 500% nozzlely If there is anything you can say of the book it s consistently interesting ridiculously funny and inherently silly There s just a lot of terribly bland poetry out there for kids Sorry but it s true And I feel bad saying that since there really isn t much poetry published in a given year for kids to begin with To my mind children s poetry breaks down into two distinct categories each with their own separate jobs First you have the meaningful poetry This is meant to get kids thinking perhaps even writing their own poetry and it lays the groundwork for future poets as well It is however prone to pablum Then you ve the funny poetry This also lures children in though oftentimes it s seen as a gateway drug to that aforementioned meaningful poetry I don t know how much respect funny poetry gets in its own right perhaps because funny poetry for adults tends to be associated with Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker rather than anyone contemporary Even so it s an artform in and of itself and Vikram Madan one of its finest practitioners And this is a relief since it would be hard to say which is painful dull meaningful poetry or unfunny funny poetry The book opens with the epic poem Ballad of the Ghost Guppies There are are a lot of things to like right off the bat here First off the premise is bonkers A young blue haired woman is in her home when some ghosts come knocking on the door bearing bags of gold and begging to be let in Greedy for the gold she allows them to pass whereupon they reveal their true intentions to snare her soul That s when she reveals herself to be a witch turning each ghost into a ghost guppy instead She then immediately sells them at a fair and plans to duplicate the plan and sell them as puppies next And all the while the rhymes are just fantastic I mean just listen to this The spooks sailed in some half some wholeAnd soon has me surrounded Their evil plan To snare my soul Their hoard A sham just painted coal Their treachery Unbounded That s just delightful The cadences The rhymes The fact that Madan scans with aplomb And throughout the book this pattern continues Comics with panels make way for some fabulous verses but Madan also works in enough of his own weird takes to make everything consistently funny When I said earlier that Madan had managed to straddle the line between poetry and comics I probably should have made it clear that he s not the only one doing so Earlier this year we saw an even blatant combo with Poetry Comics by Grant Snider Comics it seems are beginning to realize that they can reinvigorate old literary tropes and techniques that have been withering away as of late Poetry and folk fairytales do mighty well when combined with this kind of sequential storytelling If kids can t get enough comics and they definitely can t then this is truly the way to infect their brains with some high quality nuttiness verse Madan notes on his author blurb that he grew up in India and part of what I love so much about his book is the Southeast Asian representation on the pages For example there s an entire sequence set in Goa that may have kids scrambling to maps to find out where precisely it lies Of course the whole thing is chock full of people of all kinds of races ages and abilities Add in stuff like dance sequences concrete poems and even a section with panels that reminded me of some of Jason Shiga s work and you have yourself one of the finest funniest poetry books you ll have encountered in a long time For those of you lucky enough to have already read A Hatful of Dragons this is just as good if not better I m not saying that Madan s unique form of humor comics and verse will save poetry as we know it but I m not NOT saying it either Just hand it to a kid when they ask for something funny You ll be doing them a favor and isn t it nice to hand out a work of poetry during a month other than just April Clever stuff 1635928176