Villains Academy

Villains Academy
by Ryan Hammond
Recommended Ages: 9+

Master Mardybum continued. "Right, time to split you into teams. There will be two teams—A and B. You'll decide on a team name among yourselves and submit it to me tomorrow morning. Once submitted, you will not be able to change it. And if you don't choose a team name, then I'll select one for you ... and it will include the word boogers. Understood?"

Since J.K. Rowling opened the floodgates, young adult fiction has been teeming with books about alternatives to the public school system (or, what U.K. readers probably call state schools). Like a Princess Academy, or a Vampire Academy, or a School of Fear, or a Spy School. There have been space camps, a colossal number of variations on the theme of schools of magic, schools for superheroes and their sidekicks, and of course this isn't the first book featuring a school for villains. But in a hybrid of kids' chapter book and graphic novel that I've dubbed the graphic chapter book – other examples include the "Last Kids on Earth" series – this one takes the daring step of integrating witches, werewolves, ghosts, and naughty animals with the general population of bad kids who are being taught to be perfectly horrible.

Yes, the ambition for these kids (and animals) is to be serious villains when they grow up. Right now, though, a young werewolf named Bram is worried, down to the tips of his green fur, that he may not have what it takes to be truly wicked. In fact, he's not even sure he'll make it through his first week at Villains Academy, with the nefarious Master Mardybum threatening to issue merits and excluding him from detention with the rest of his team. Bram would just like to prove himself enough to earn the Villain of the Week award, but his attempts to be bad just get him and his group – nicknamed the Weirdoughs – into trouble. And at times, it feels like even his friends are turning against him. But they'll need to work together to survive their end-of-the-week test in the Maze of Mystery.

It's a goofy, subversive and oddly touching story about truly weird kids in an environment that flips goodness and badness upside-down. I don't know what kind of influence it will exert on young readers' behavior, but I can predict that there will be giggles and some heartwarming feelings as they get to know fuzzy Bram and his friends, a ghost named Sheila, a skeleton named Tony, a flatulent lion named Bryan, and the hardest nut to crack, an elf-witch named Mona.

This is Book 1 of the Villains Academy trilogy, followed up by How to Steal a Dragon and How to Win the Gruesome Games. Between Hammond's author blurb on his literary agent's website (see link above) and his acknowledgements at the end of this book, it's apparent that he's an English author-illustrator who has a twin brother, a male significant other (which may partly explain why Bram has two dads) and a haunted house crammed with books. He apparently takes a whimsical interest in being bad, as evidenced by the letter at the start of this book presenting readers with their "pass to badness" and advising them, "Being bad is a choice. Don't be bad all the time, please. But do read on if you want to learn how to be a true villain. P.S. Sorry, adults."