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Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil

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

Book cover for 'Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil' by Michael J. Bowler, featuring three children on bicycles with a mysterious hooded figure in the background and a dark, atmospheric landscape.

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.

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Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Michael J. Bowler. The opinions expressed in this post are based on my personal views.

GUEST POST

How reading fiction helps kids with learning differences feel less alone.

I grew up hearing impaired. I wasn’t deaf. I just didn’t hear clearly, especially higher frequencies like the human voice. No hearing aids were availableto help me until I was almost twenty-one.

Oh, and no other kid in any of the schools I attended had hearing loss.

I was alone, often bullied because my replies did not match the questions. I was also an avid reader because my imaginary life was often better than my real one.

There were no kids like me in any books I read growing up. I truly thought I was the only boy like me in the world.

I’ve become aware of a children’s picture book called Willie’s Gift by Clairmarie Field about a dog with extra-large ears who hears better than other dogs and learns to accept his “uniqueness.” Such a story might’ve been of help to me as a child, even though Willie’s uniqueness was the opposite of mine.

Because my hearing loss was an invisible disability, everyone, including my parents, would often forget it existed and I’d get in trouble for not following directions I didn’t hear correctly.

I instinctively learned how to read lips, which helped me get through school. Teachers who didn’t know I was hearing impaired looked uncomfortable at I focused on their mouths while they spoke. I thought that was funny.

One of my favorite teachers in high school taught Spanish (which was very difficult for a hearing-impaired kid to master, and I never did.) One day when I asked him to repeat something several times, he looked at me and joked, “Are you hard of hearing or what?” When I replied, “Yes, I am,” he was mortified and probably apologized to me every single day for months thereafter. I told him not to worry, that it didn’t hurt my feelings. And it didn’t, because it came from a place of ignorance, not malice.

As an adult, I taught special education classes. Some of those kids were like me, hard of hearing. Others, who had learning disabilities, were also like me in the way their brains processed information – that is, incorrectly. I understood those kids better than most teachers because I was one of them, and I strove to find books that reflected their reality.

There were none.

I wrote a screenplay that I later turned into a novel in which the main teen characters had disabilities that reflected those in my classes. My students and I read the script aloud in class and it was a revelation to them to see in print kids just like them. The book version—intended for teens thirteen and up—has won multiple awards for its diverse characters who, despite having what are called disabilities, use their innate abilities to protect each other.

Mine was one of the first books I know of to feature a learning-disabled boy in a wheelchair as the hero.Hopefully, it’s not the last.

My newest book for middle grade readers features a twelve-year-old narrator with ADHD, but he’s not portrayed as “disabled.” In many ways, ADHD kids think faster and react to situations more rapidly than those with “ordinary” brains. I taught many such kids during my career, and they learn as well as everyone else, just in their own way.

In fact, I discovered that every child is unique in terms of how they learn. The job of education shouldn’t be to shoehorn every kid into a one-size-fits-all curriculum, but to discover how each student learns and tailor the curriculum accordingly. Alas, this isn’t happening in most schools because it’s not expedient.

Since most schools won’t accommodate the uniqueness of children, it’s awesome when authors to step up and fill that void. Every child should see him or herself in some book they read if only to understand that they’re not they only one of their kind in the world, like I felt growing up.

I’m happy there are more books these days featuring kids with disabilities, but there should be more with children who are hard of hearing, as opposed to deaf. Hard of hearing kids like me struggle with group activities, sports, school functions like dances, and we can feel very isolated. Seeing characters like us in books finding ways to overcome or get around their hearing loss could be helpful.

It might’ve been for me.

I have yet to feature a hearing-impaired character in one of my books, but it will happen. I put such a character into a stage play I wrote many years ago, but not in a book for kids. My newest MG novel features a Big Brother mentor to my main character, reflecting my many years with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.

I started as a “Big” in my twenties and my first three “Little Brothers” were hearing impaired, like me. For all of us, having someone who went through or was going through the same life experience was immensely helpful. My first “Little” was the first young person I ever met with hearing loss.

If you’re the parent of a child with a disability, try to find books that reflect your child’s reality. If you can’t, make sure your child’s teacher understands how your child learns. An IEP (Individualized Education Program) can be helpful if it’s written in a concrete,measurable fashion and is continually implemented in the classroom.

Oftentimes, they’re not.

Lastly, expectations are killers for parents and teachers – that is, expecting a child or pupil to be a certain way because you are that way. I always let my students teach me what they needed, and I’d often toss the “mandated curriculum” out the window when it wasn’t suitable for their needs. As a Big Brother and later a parent, I had no expectations for my kids. Whatever they liked I learned to like. I didn’t try to get them into sports I favored or activities that I enjoyed. I let them show me who they were and what was of interest to them.

I love reading, and so does my son, if it’s an audio book. His eyes glaze over with tons of small words on a page. He’s an auditory learner, the opposite of me due to my hearing loss. Did I try to force him to read books off the page?

No.

Sometimes his teachers wanted the kids to read from a tablet. He hated that, too, so I read it to him. And you know, he can recall every detail of books he’s listened too even years later.

I never played a second of soccer in my childhood. My son loved soccer, so I loved it with him and attended every game. I even had to coach a few times.I adapted to him.

The best parents and teachers have no expectations for the kids in their lives except the basics – be respectful, say please and thank you, and do your best. And of course, those must be modeled by us, the adults, if they’re to sink in.

My parents were good people, but there had never been a kid with a disability in their families, so I was something of an adjustment. Add in that my hearing loss—like a learning disability—is invisible and it’s a recipe for making lots of mistakes. Having them say to me, “You can hear when you want to” was tough, because I knew it wasn’t true.Because of such incidents, I’d sometimes dream of having perfect hearing like my peers.

The best we as adults can do is not expect any child to be like any other child. Let them teach us who they are and what they need. It’sour job to accept them.And, of course, to love them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A smiling man wearing a straw hat with a black ribbon and a black shirt featuring flame patterns.

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.

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