THE ADVENTURES OF BENNY

A sequence of adventures details a small boy’s encounters with a Bigfoot with smelly feet, a mummy named King Butt, pirates searching for a killer squid, a booger-man under his bed and a ghost guarding buried treasure on Monkey Island. Third graders will appreciate the short, relatively easy-to-read chapters, lively typesetting and Shreve’s heavily inked black-and-white drawings on every page. The author misses no opportunity to indulge in taboo humor: Bigfoot gets a splinter in his “hiney;” Benny and his uncle rewrap the mummy in toilet paper; the boy eats snakes and rats; his dog vanquishes the under-the-bed monster with a sauerkraut fart. What might have worked well as a series of exaggerated bedtime stories seems overdone in print, however, and lacks the manic visual energy of such masters as Dav Pilkey and newcomer Eric Wight. Although clearly aimed at Captain Underpants fans, this misses the target. (Fiction. 7-10)