Dungeon Academy: Tourney of Terror

Madeleine Roux's Dungeon Academy: Tourney of Terror is a funny fantasy adventure for 8 year olds about a human girl hiding in plain sight at a school for monsters.

What happens

Zelli wears fake horns and a tail, so everyone thinks she's a minotaur like the two minotaur mums who raised her. Humans are hated here, so only her closest friends know the truth. And they're brilliant friends. Hugo is a vegan owlbear, Bauble is a know-it-all mimic who can turn into a book or a shovel, Snabla is a kobold who swears he's related to dragons, and Flash is a blink dog who pops in and out of thin air.

This isn't the gang's first adventure together, and the story fills you in on the earlier one as it goes.

Now Zelli keeps having the same nightmare, about a tomb under the desert sands and a voice promising that the Lord of Death will rise. She goes digging for answers in the forbidden caves under the school. There she finds a strange carved door, and gets chased by a whole crowd of skeletons.

Nobody wants to hear about it, though. The Tourney of Terror has begun, and the Waterdeep Dragons have flown in for the Goreball championship. (Goreball, in case you were wondering, involves luring a wailing blob of eyeballs down a pitch.) Even Zelli's mum is too busy blowing her whistle to listen.

Reading it is great gruesome fun. The monsters boo the dragons so nobody gets detention for good sportsmanship, the school song boasts about how they smell, and the snack stalls sell crispy bats. Zelli's frustration with grown-ups who won't take her seriously will ring very true.

There's something tender in it too. Zelli feels a bit apart from her friends while they're all swept up in the excitement, and she has a complicated relationship with the famous human adventurer who is her birth mother.

The scary bits are skeletons, nightmares and a creepy villain rather than anything gory. Zelli calls her mum Mom, American style.

What to read next

Grilled Cheese and Dragons has another heroine who won't do as she's told, a princess who would much rather be at Knight School than learning ladylike manners.