King Arthur's Very Great Grandson

On the morning of his sixth birthday, Henry Alfred Grummorson leaps atop Knuckles, his trusty donkey, and gallops off in search of adventure.  He encounters a Dragon, a Cyclops, and a Griffin, but to his dismay, they are all friendly!  Yearning for a real battle, Henry heads to the sea where he challenges the most fearsome of all beasts, the Leviathan....
 

King Arthur's Very Great Grandson was a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Children's Book of the Year and a Junior Library Guild Selection.
 

 

In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly said; Debut author Kraegel proves he’s a talent to be reckoned with. He has a Monty Pythonesque sense of language, humor, pacing, and character—the text’s mixture of bombastic and deadpan deliveries makes for a stirring read-aloud. This fine sense of the epically absurd also animates Kraegel’s rococo watercolor and ink renderings: in his hands, a dragon’s scales coalesce into an intricate mosaic, a tree is a swirl of mazelike lines, and the sea becomes a tangled mass of blue ribbons.