Princess Pulverizer 2 – Worse, Worser, Wurst

Nancy Krulik's Worse, Worser, Wurst is a funny quest for 7 year olds about a princess who would much rather have a suit of armour than a crown.

What happens

Princess Serena of Empiria calls herself Princess Pulverizer, and what she wants is Knight School. Her father the king won't let her go until she has done eight good deeds. A Quest of Kindness, he calls it.

She has done one. Seven to go, and she is getting impatient.

Travelling with her are the two least knightly companions imaginable. Lucas got laughed out of Knight School and nicknamed Lucas the Lily-Livered, and he is scared of absolutely everything. Dribble is a dragon who was thrown out of his lair because he kept using his fire to make grilled cheese sandwiches instead of burning down villages.

They're loyal, they're kind, and they are no use in a fight whatsoever. Which is rather the point.

The book opens with Lucas screaming about a hairy creeping monster in a tree. Princess Pulverizer climbs up, flexes her muscles at it, and comes down with a caterpillar on her finger. She can't even count that as a good deed.

Then the three of them wander into a kingdom where nobody is smiling. Not a giggle. Not a guffaw. Not even a tee-hee. Somebody has taken the jester, and the laughing has stopped.

The humour is broad and daft and pitched exactly right for a child who has just started managing chapters on their own. Dribble sneezes and blows Lucas clean over. Dribble drools and a villager runs away screaming. Dribble smiles his friendliest smile, which makes his eyes bulge, and another one flees.

What lifts it above the silliness is Princess Pulverizer herself. She is loud, impatient and completely sure of herself, and the joke is never that a girl wants to be a knight. Everyone accepts that. The obstacle is her father's list, and her own habit of charging at things.

She's also learning, slowly. When Dribble asks whether he looks scary, she looks at the teeth and the claws and the bulging eyes, and says no, because she is trying to be kind these days. It's a genuinely funny bit of restraint.

Nothing here needs a warning. There's an evil wizard offstage and an ogre in the past, and the worst thing that happens on the page is a caterpillar getting sneezed out of a tree.

One practical note. This is the second book, and the counting of good deeds runs across the whole series, so a reader picking it up cold will want to know that.

What to read next

Which is a good reason to start at the beginning. Grilled Cheese and Dragons has Princess Serena swinging from the rafters of the Royal School of Ladylike Manners instead of learning how to hold a teacup, and it's where the whole eight-deed bargain gets struck.