By Colorado Kids Advisory Board member Tom Roberts

Title: Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy; Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets
Author & Illustrator: Dav Pilkey
Publisher: The Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Number of Pages: 175

This latest in the Captain Underpants series of books isn't all it's cracked up to be. If you've read other Captain Underpants books, the formula is all too familiar: There's a villain, and Captain Underpants (the school principal under a spell) must defeat said villain.

In the Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, the main characters are a pair of pranksters, George and Harold, who love practical jokes. Their latest one is a "squishy" where you put ketchup packets under a toilet seat and wait for someone to sit down. Everyone loves the new joke, except for one person: the nerdy Melvin Sneedly.

Melvin has an invention called the Combine-o-tron 2000, which can combine any two objects. but no one is amazed, and everyone ignores Melvin. However, George and Harold adopt a bionic hamster that came to be as a result of the Combine-o-tron 2000. Melvin tries to combine himself with a robot, but accidentally becomes a hideous mucus monster. Will George and Harold be able to stop the monster? What about Captain Underpants?

This book is geared toward 7 to 8 year olds, about second graders, people who really like snot jokes (*cough* Eric *cough*), and people who like Captain Underpants no matter what. If you don't fall into the above categories, you might want to skip this book. (March, 2004)