Princess Pulverizer 5 – Watch That Witch!

Nancy Krulik's Watch That Witch is a silly quest story for 7 year olds about a princess who would much rather be a knight.

What happens

Princess Pulverizer is on a Quest of Kindness. Her father the king won't let her into Knight School until she's done eight good deeds. She's managed four. She is not enjoying herself.

She travels with Lucas, a boy who left Knight School after the other boys called him lily-livered, and who is currently practising his fencing against a pear tree with a butter knife. And with Dribble, a dragon who mainly wants to toast cheese sandwiches and is lugging a very heavy mace that a grateful king gave them.

They walk into the village of Starats under a double rainbow and discover that nobody there needs any help at all. Everybody is smiling. Princess Pulverizer is furious about it.

Then the washerwomen tell them about the twin witches. Anna is the kind one and uses her magic to keep the place peaceful. Elle is the other one. They look identical, so you have to watch to work out which is which.

Princess Pulverizer decides that ridding a village of an evil witch would be a very good deed indeed. She also finds Elle far better company than Anna, which is the real joke of the book and takes her a good while to spot.

The humour is pitched exactly at a child who has just started reading on their own. Bad puns, mostly from the washerwomen. Artichoke hearts becoming Artie chokes hearts. A leopard that fell in the laundry and lost its spots. A tongue twister about two witches watching two watches.

There's a nice running gag with the sword of truth. It was a present from a king, and it quivers whenever she says something that isn't quite so. When she announces she has become really kind, it starts shaking and she has to downgrade herself to kinder.

The chapters are short and there are a lot of sound effects in capitals. It moves along.

Nothing in it is frightening. Elle threatens to turn people into newts and does some showy magic with a set of bagpipes, but the tone stays cheerful the whole way through.

What to read next

Your reader can drop in here without having read the others, though the quest makes more sense from the beginning. Grilled Cheese and Dragons is where it starts, with a princess called Serena swinging from the rafters of the Royal School of Ladylike Manners and landing bottom first in a bowl of pomegranate pudding.