ALA Booklist (Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 CST 1997)

McMullan launches a promising tongue-in-cheek fantasy series featuring a would-be dragon slayer with an aversion to violence; young Wiglaf of Pinwick leaves his family and with his beloved pig, Daisy, sets off to enroll in the Dragon Slayers Academy. Almost immediately, he is sent off with bloodthirsty classmate Eric, plus a bent and, as it turns out, cowardly magic sword, optimistically named Surekill, to do battle with Gorzil the dragon. Gorzil happens to be no easy mark, but after Eric is disarmed, Wiglaf discovers the monster's secret weakness (every dragon has one): knock-knock jokes. Fortunately, the young hero has a seemingly inexhaustible supply, and soon Gorzil is dragon dust. McMullan creates an appealing, unwarlike protagonist, with the inner stuff to cope with situations both daffy and dangerous, and gives him a colorful, somehow familiar supporting cast that includes Daisy, who acquires the ability to speak pig latin, and Eric, who is really Erica, as in Princess Erica, daughter of Queen Barb and King Ken, in disguise. Readers will laugh out loud at the cleverest, most manic kickoff since Scieszka's Knights of the Kitchen Table (1991). Illustrations not seen. (Reviewed December 1, 1997)

Horn Book (Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1997)

Wiglaf leaves his loutish family to enter the Dragon Slayers' Academy. The school is not all it's cracked up to be, but even so Wiglaf manages to slay a terrible dragon by discovering its weakness; he kills it with knock-knock jokes. The humor is broad and slapstick, and there is essentially no characterization or setting, just fast-paced plot and thin farce with dark, caricature-like illustrations.

School Library Journal

Gr 2-4--A fantasy adventure for beginning chapter-book readers. Wiglaf, the would-be hero, lives with his large, brutish family in abject poverty. Their hovel smells worse than their pigsty. Though Wiglaf is the smallest member of the family, he is made to do all the work, and is constantly picked on by the others because he is reluctant to kill any living thing. A traveling minstrel tells Wiglaf's fortune; it shows that he can improve his lot by performing a gallant act. The boy decides to sign up at the local Dragon Slayers' Academy--it guarantees to make him a hero. However, he finds life at the run-down school as difficult as it is at home, and he protests when he is sent out to slay the local dragon on his first day. When his magic sword doesn't work, he switches to another strategy. He has learned that the dragon can't stand bad jokes so he tries a few and, as predicted, the dragon expires at his feet. Wiglaf is a hero without spilling a single drop of blood. The fast-paced, snappy text is filled with jokes and insults; the accompanying black-and-white illustrations are dark and cartoonlike. The tone and style suggest Saturday-morning animated films and will appeal to the same audience. For humorous adventure fantasy that is better crafted and more nourishing, try Jon Scieszka's Knights of the Kitchen Table (Viking, 1991) and other works in the "Time Warp Trio" series.--Virginia Golodetz, Children's Literature New England, Burlington, VT