Dungeon Crawlers Academy

Gr 3--6--Dungeon crawling isn't for the faint of heart. Or adults. In this new fantasy series, Sullivan weaves together manga, video games, and Dungeons & Dragons to craft a universe where treasure is up for grabs, but only if you're a child. At the Dungeon Crawler's Academy, promising young explorers are trained, sent through a magic portal, and expected to return loot home for sale. Our lead character only ends up there by accident, bonding with a staff that imbues him with magic, but at the cost of a $5 million debt. The commercial aspect of the whole enterprise adds an interesting wrinkle to a book that plays it safe in just about every other regard. From setting to character, this series has little interest in moving beyond genre tropes, which makes it a very safe read with few creative risks. This even extends to the art, which feels drawn from an animated series and has a decent flow but lacks detail. Main character designs are expressive, if extremely young-looking for their purported age. Characters of color are mostly relegated to the background. VERDICT A solid book that doesn't do much to push boundaries or show readers anything they haven't seen before. Despite this, it's still worth a look for libraries seeking to engage readers who are into Minecraft or other dungeon crawl games.--Nate Hipple

Welcome to the school that trains young treasure hunters to seek out magical artifacts in a perilous parallel dimension. Artifacts fetched through a magical portal that admits only kids can be auctioned off for big bucks--though young Nathan is starting at a disadvantage, as his inadvertent, nonreversible bonding to school founder T.J. Vance's $5 million wizard's staff has saddled him with an unusual load of student debt. Worse yet, hardly has he begun attending classes at the titular high school than he's teamed up for an exploratory field trip with compulsively light-fingered overachiever Mandy and surly Zach, an undersized sociopath with an exaggeratedly outsized magic sword. Maintaining a properly adolescent tone of detached irony as they battle their way past kobolds, goblins, necrogoblins, and a zombie giant (which, explains Mandy pedantically, is different from a giant zombie), the three emerge triumphantly, if neither as rich nor as high on the scoring leaderboard as they expect. (Stay tuned for further misadventures, as their exploits leave the roused and irritated Dungeon Master behind.) In the brightly colored, tidily composed panels, Damaso dresses manga-eyed students in conventional RPG--style costumes and gives a few brown or olive complexions; most figures, though, including the three main characters, are White. May entice gamers to put their phones away for a while. (school prospectus) (Graphic fantasy. 10-13) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.