The Doldrums and the Helmsley Curse

The violence is cartoonish and little real harm usually results, but besides a nefarious scheme for world domination that involves drugging unsuspecting victims, villains grab, imprison, and threaten the kids, tear off the front of a house, and also leave an elderly couple on an iceberg to die. Archer's friend Adélaïde has a wooden leg due to a childhood mishap, and a mean girl trips her; an adult has one eye.

Tween characters sometimes hold hands for mutual support, and some characters are starting to have a flicker of romantic interest in others.

Much of the plot deals with "Doxical Powder," a powerful substance that makes people do the opposite of what they normally would -- and a lot of ethical dilemmas about whether it's OK to dose unsuspecting people in service of a "good cause."

Parents need to know that while The Doldrums and the Helmsley Curse is billed as a "stand-alone sequel" to author-illustrator Nicholas Gannon's The Doldrums, it picks up where the first book ended. Readers who skip volume 1 may get lost at times -- and also miss a long-running in-joke about a character's wooden leg. There's Dahl-esque comic creepiness (hidden laboratories, poisonous plants, talking taxidermied animals) and cartoonish violence (villains abandon explorers on an iceberg, grab and threaten kids, etc.). It also dips into the ethics of biochemical warfare, as heroes and villains consider using a substance called "Doxical Powder" for their own ends. Through it all, oddball 12-year-olds Archer, Adélaïde, and Oliver navigate their dreamily retro world and the demands of friendship as they try to foil a villain's plot against Archer's explorer grandparents.