FAIRY NUFF

Feckless but clever when it counts, young Fairy Nuff does accidentally blow up his woodland house—but on the bright side, he then helps to thwart a nuffarious neighbor’s plot to take over the Empire, earns a knighthood, and makes twenty thousand billion pounds to boot in this veddy British farce. As Fairy’s sibs Biggie and Sweetie, as well as their parents, Oldie Nuff and Oldie Nuff, have previously decamped, no one is hurt when the exploding barrel of gunpowder sets off an array of old war souvenirs. But after an errant grenade scatters gruff Widow Jennett Buhiss’s stock certificates to the winds, she orders her hulking henchman Orc to “ ‘BRING ME THE HEAD OF FAIRY NUFF!’ ” Fortunately, Fairy Nuff keeps his head; unfortunately, he’s slated to become dinner for the carnivorous rain forest plants in Widow Buhiss’s glasshouse. And luckily, he’s thrown into the same shed where Buhiss has stashed the kidnapped Queen of England. Brennan’s storyline doesn’t so much develop as take a series of wild spins and then chop off abruptly, but his extravagant puns and over-the-top pacing, enhanced by the raffish caricatures Collins (Busy Night, not reviewed, etc.) strews across every spread, will give fans of Ian Whybrow’s Little Wolf tales and the like more practice in delighted eye-rolling. Fair enuff. (Fiction. 9-11)