This post is sponsored by Michael J. Bowler. The review and opinions expressed in this post are based on my personal views.
MY REVIEW
If you like your middle grade adventures weird, funny, and just a little unhinged, Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil is a wild ride worth taking. Michael J. Bowler throws readers straight into mystery when Elmo Fitzroy, nicknamed Muppit Boy, witnesses something impossible: a giant mutant slug blasting through a wall. Yes, a slug. And somehow it only gets stranger from there.
Elmo is an unlikely hero, part detective, part underdog, all heart. Bullied, underestimated, and armed with a sharp mind, he teams up with his friends to investigate a bizarre conspiracy involving creepy villains, secret experiments, and the sinister Dr. Drug. Every chapter seems to spring another trapdoor. Just when you think you know where the story is going, something slimy, strange, or dangerous leaps out of the shadows.
What I loved most is the book’s fearless imagination. It has that delicious anything-can-happen energy kids adore. There’s humor woven through the suspense, genuine friendship at the center, and enough twists to keep readers flipping pages way past bedtime. It feels part mystery, part comic adventure, part fever dream in the best possible way.
Bowler clearly understands how to keep middle grade readers hooked: danger, laughs, gross-out surprises, and a hero worth rooting for. If your reader likes books that feel like Goosebumps collided with a detective story and a sci-fi experiment, this wonderfully weird adventure should be on their radar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil
Written by Michael J. Bowler
Illustrated by Pintado (cover); Hanna Boanna (chapter heading illustrations)
Ages: 9-12 | 264 Pages
Publisher: Michael Bowler (2026) | ISBN: 979-8993648606
Publisher’s Book Summary: AN INTERNET JOKE. AN EVIL GENIUS. A HERO IS BORN.
Gifted with a brain that works like a video recorder, twelve-year-old aspiring detective Elmo Fitzroy — famous on YouTube, thanks to his mother, as “Muppit Boy” because of really humiliating videos — becomes embroiled in a world-domination plot hatched by an evil scientist out to control humanity with deadly allergies.
Mo’s life plan is simple: ditch his dweeby childhood alter ego and fly under the radar to survive middle school. It backfires big time when he helps his Big Brother mentor — a police detective — investigate an old woman in a clown mask who robs people of their hearing aids.
Little does he realize that chasing clues with friends Barney Kettlewick and Kashvi Jindal will lead to a battle with ugly shoes, pursuit by chainsaw-wielding maniacs, an embarrassingly public rescue by a California condor, a meeting with Homeland Security, and his ADHD soaring into overdrive.
The kid who’s always been a joke must somehow become a hero to save his family, friends, and, well, the whole world.
PURCHASE LINKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning author Michael J. Bowler has been a high school teacher, a volunteer Big Brother to eight boys with the Catholic Big Brothers Big Sisters program, a decades-long volunteer within the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles and is a single dad to an adopted child.
Discover more from the author at michaeljbowler.com.
https://www.instagram.com/michaeljbowler
https://www.facebook.com/michaeljbowler.author
GIVEAWAY
Readers who enter this giveaway will have the chance to win one signed hardcover, one of five signed paperback copies, or one of five audiobook downloads of Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil by Michael J. Bowler. One grand prize winner will receive a signed hardcover plus a $50 Amazon gift card!
