Once Upon a Tim

Parents need to know that Once Upon a Tim, is the first book in a series by best-selling author Stuart Gibbs (Spy School, Charlie Thorne). It's a fun, silly, fast-moving, illustrated tale of a tween boy and his BFF Belinda, who forsake miserable peasant life for a chance to be knights and set off to help a prince rescue a princess. There's fart humor, bathroom humor, and one or two crude gestures along the way. There's also a lot of stereotype-busting as, for good and ill, people refuse to conform to expectations, from gender roles to fairytale conventions: e.g. the prince is a cowardly jerk, the princess is more than a match for villains and adversity, etc. One of the characters is the "village idiot" -- both he and everyone else define him this way, and it's a long family tradition, but it turns out to be a bit more complicated. Most of the violence is silly and cartoonish (e.g. hacking with swords at monster butterflies and bashing villains over the head with a large bone), but a couple of outfoxed villains plunge to death from a cliff. Author Gibbs packs the story with vocabulary-building words and tags them as "IQ Booster."