Review of "Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler" by James Seamone, Illustrated by Ian Etheridge

Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)

Did your parents, grandparents, or older siblings ever pinch their thumb between two fingers, hold it in front of your face, and announce, “I’ve got your nose”?

It is one of those strange childhood games that makes absolutely no sense when examined from an adult perspective. The child’s nose is clearly still attached to their face, the thumb does not look remotely like a nose, and yet generations of children have reacted with shock, laughter, or an urgent demand to have their stolen body part returned.

But what if someone really did take your nose?

What if a green, fanged creature crawled through your bedroom window, swiped it from your face, stuffed it into a sack, and carried it back to a cave filled with hundreds of stolen noses? What if this creature had no nose of his own and wore a cloak woven from the nostril hairs of his victims?

Welcome to Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler, one of the strangest, grossest, goofiest, and most unapologetically ridiculous children’s books we have encountered.

That statement carries some weight. Lately, we have reviewed stories involving a missing parrot, smuggled hummingbirds, a poetry-writing prison guard, a rescued wallaby, outsider-art monuments, cruise-ship catastrophes, disappearing human beings, and enough eccentric characters and detours to populate several separate novels. In the past, we have also encountered flying snapping turtles, violent giraffes, impossible aliens, nonsensical inventions, and plots that seem to operate according to the logic of dreams.

We therefore believed our tolerance for literary chaos was unusually high.

Then the Notorious Nose Nabbler arrived.

Children are often fascinated by the very things adults are trained to avoid discussing in polite company. Boogers, burps, loose teeth, belly buttons, bodily noises, and other mildly disgusting subjects have fueled playground jokes and bedtime stories for generations. Young readers are also frequently more willing than adults to accept absurdity without demanding a detailed explanation. Dr. Seuss filled his stories with impossible creatures and delightfully mangled words. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales transformed familiar stories into deliberate nonsense. The Captain Underpants series built entire adventures around bathroom humor, ridiculous villains, and childlike anarchy, while The Book with No Pictures demonstrated how thoroughly children can be entertained by silly sounds and escalating verbal nonsense.

Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler proudly joins that tradition. It does not apologize for its premise, attempt to make the Nose Nabbler scientifically plausible, or stop to explain why children’s noses apparently smell strongly of sausages. It simply introduces its bizarre rules and charges forward with complete confidence.

The story begins by describing the Nose Nabbler, a “slight and nimble” creature born without a nose of his own. He compensates for this absence by stealing noses from children and displaying them like trophies inside his slimy lair. He collects large noses, small noses, long noses, round noses, broad noses, bumpy noses, skinny noses, squished noses, and practically every other variety he can find. His vocabulary is equally diverse, as the book gleefully refers to noses as conks, snouts, honkers, schnuzzles, and other increasingly silly terms.

Two girls named Ophelia and Astrid are familiar with the stories, but they consider the Nose Nabbler too ridiculous to be real. They ignore every warning their parents have given them. They leave the window open, fail to check beneath the bed, neglect to apply their Anti-Nabbler cream, and even wear a Toronto Blue Jays cap despite being warned that the creature loves the team.
The book then delivers the logical consequence of this deeply illogical situation. Ophelia and Astrid awaken while staying with their favorite uncles, Nick and Nate, and discover flat patches of skin where their noses used to be. Their uncles realize that the Nose Nabbler has struck and decide to pursue him using the most reasonable tracking method imaginable: following the sausage-like smell of the stolen noses with a specialized scanner.

Nick and Nate obtain a Nose Nabbler Net and a Sausage Smell Scanner, then launch an increasingly elaborate journey across Canada. Their pursuit takes them to Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, Toronto’s CN Tower, and finally Niagara Falls. At each destination, they search the crowds, locate the Nabbler, give chase, and watch him escape “like a nasty smell on a stiff wind,” “a foul stench on a spring breeze,” or some other appropriately odor-based variation.
This book is extraordinarily random in concept, but it is not actually difficult to follow. That is an important distinction.

Unlike some surreal stories in which the central objective disappears beneath layers of unrelated characters and subplots, Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler maintains a simple narrative spine. The villain steals two noses. Nick and Nate must track him down, recover the stolen goods, and return them to their rightful owners. The details surrounding that mission are completely unhinged, but the mission itself remains clear.

In other words, the book may be more random than many of the chaotic stories we have reviewed, yet it is paradoxically more organized. The nonsense is contained within a traditional chase narrative, allowing young readers to enjoy the absurdity without becoming lost inside it.

The Canadian identity of the book is another source of humor and personality. This is not a story that merely happens to take place in Canada. It practically becomes a cross-country tourism campaign involving kidnapped facial features and sausage-detecting technology.

The locations are recognizable and varied, and each stop gives Ian Etheridge an opportunity to create a dramatically different visual environment. Readers move from Gothic architecture and crowded urban streets to turquoise lakes, towering mountains, coastal rocks, famous city landmarks, and the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Even the language reinforces the setting through Canadian spellings, bilingual airport signage, references to the Blue Jays, and location-specific symbols.

The route itself is hilariously inefficient. Nick and Nate move from eastern Canada to Banff, then back across the country to Nova Scotia, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. An adult may wonder who planned this journey or how much they spent on airfare, but such practical concerns have no place in a story involving a nostril-haired monster and a sausage scanner.

The illustrations are unquestionably the book’s greatest strength. Ian Etheridge fills the pages with vibrant colors, expressive characters, detailed backgrounds, exaggerated poses, and an energetic cartoon style that makes the story feel like an animated television adventure. The landscapes are especially impressive. The cool blues of Moraine Lake, the glowing sunset around Peggy’s Cove, the architectural details of Parliament Hill, and the rushing waters of Niagara Falls give the chase a visual scale far larger than the simple premise might suggest.

Several of the crowded scenes also introduce a light “Where’s Waldo?” element. The prose repeatedly tells us that it takes Nick and Nate ages to spot the Nabbler, and readers can join the search by examining the surrounding crowds. These spreads reward children for slowing down, exploring the backgrounds, and locating small visual jokes rather than rushing directly to the next page.

Etheridge also understands how to make the Nose Nabbler both grotesque and strangely entertaining. The creature has enormous yellow teeth, green skin, long limbs, an unsettling mass of stolen nostril hair, and no nose of his own. He is frightening enough to feel like a genuine monster, but exaggerated enough to remain part of the joke. Sensitive younger children may find him alarming, particularly when he appears near sleeping children or displays stolen noses on his cave wall, but many readers will probably regard his ugliness as part of the fun.

The illustrator’s funniest contribution may be the fake online product listing. Nick and Nate purchase the Smell Scanner 3000 from “rainforest.ca,” an unmistakably Canadian parody of Amazon. The scanner costs $59.99, carries a 4.5-star rating from 5,331 customers, and apparently works with both cyborg and turnip phones. The listing even includes an age restriction.

That image is not necessary to understand the plot, but it demonstrates how much thought went into the book’s background comedy. Adults reading the story aloud may laugh at details that younger readers overlook, while children can enjoy the sheer ridiculousness of ordering specialized monster-hunting equipment online. The illustration expands the joke beyond anything stated in the prose and makes the fictional world feel strangely complete.

James Seamone’s writing relies heavily on repetition, alliteration, rhyme-like phrasing, and playful vocabulary. Names such as the Notorious Nose Nabbler, Nose Nabbler Net, and Sausage Smell Scanner are designed to be spoken aloud. Words are enlarged, stretched, recolored, twisted, or displayed in fonts that visually imitate their meaning. “Long” is written as a long line, “round” appears rounded, and “squished” looks compressed.

This typographical playfulness gives the book a loud and energetic personality. However, it occasionally becomes visually overwhelming. So many fonts, colors, shadows, sizes, and text effects compete for attention that some passages may be harder for emerging readers to process independently. The decorative main font is also less immediately readable than a simpler typeface would have been.

The middle portion of the book is similarly repetitive. Nick and Nate arrive at a landmark, scan the area, search the crowds, spot the Nabbler, chase him, and watch him escape. Repetition can be effective in children’s literature because it creates anticipation and invites young listeners to predict what will happen next. Nevertheless, one or two additional variations in the chase structure could have strengthened the momentum and made each stop feel more narratively distinct.

Ophelia and Astrid also largely disappear from the action after their noses are stolen. This makes sense because the title identifies Nick and Nate as the heroes, but the girls have such lively designs and personalities that we would have enjoyed seeing them participate more actively in the eventual capture. Even a parallel sequence showing how they cope without noses, attempt to help from home, or communicate with their uncles could have added another layer to the adventure.
Still, these concerns do not undermine the book’s greatest achievement: it knows exactly what kind of story it wants to be.

Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler does not merely contain silliness. It revels in silliness. It takes a familiar childhood joke, turns it into a monster story, transforms that monster story into a Canadian travel adventure, and concludes with a canoe plunging over Niagara Falls while one man grabs a sack of noses and another captures a creature in midair with a net.

The recovered noses are eventually returned to children around the world, while the Nabbler is imprisoned inside a structure shaped like a nostril. Naturally, the walls are covered in slime and boogers. The final page then delivers a variation on the classic warning that you can pick your nose and pick your friends, but you cannot pick your friend’s nose. What else could the ending possibly have been?

This book will appeal most strongly to children who enjoy monsters, gross-out humor, energetic read-alouds, visual searching games, and stories that proudly refuse to behave sensibly. Adults who require strict realism may find themselves asking too many questions, but the intended audience is unlikely to care how the scanner works, why noses smell like meat, or who constructed a nostril-shaped prison.

They will be too busy laughing, searching for the Nabbler, and checking to make sure their own noses are still attached.

Nick & Nate vs. The Notorious Nose Nabbler is colorful, imaginative, proudly Canadian, wonderfully illustrated, and ridiculous from beginning to end. In a week filled with some of the strangest books we have ever reviewed, it still managed to surprise us.

Check it out on Amazon!