Monstrous Maud: Horror Holiday by A B Saddlewick
| Monstrous Maud: Horror Holiday by A B Saddlewick | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: If your parents didn't know you were at school with monsters, you'd hate it too if they went camping with your were-friends… Sprightly, imaginative, this is this series back to its best. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 128 | Date: February 2013 |
| Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books | |
| ISBN: 9781780551722 | |
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And you think you have it tough… Maud is the only human at a school entirely populated by monsters – vampires, zombies, invisible people and so on. So just put yourself in her shoes when it's parents' evening, trying to divert her family from realising the truth about everyone and everything around them. Worse than that, try and put yourself in her shoes when it's revealed that she has to get an impossibly high score on an essay to not be kept back a year and lose contact with all her best friends. Worse than that, empathise with Maud as her folks meet another pupil's family at the parents' evening, and they therefore agree to go on holiday with a family of werewolves… at full moon…
We are long past the stage where it doesn't matter what order in which one reads these Monstrous Maud books. This flashes back to a circumstance regarding an incident with a baby-sitter and gets pell-mell on with it. It being the very amusing camping holiday that ends up being arranged. Throw in the monster that scares all other monsters, a witch and the pressing deadline of the perfect essay and you have a very snappy adventure.
I wasn't completely impressed by the first sequel in this series, Spooky Sports Day. For me there, the balance between the surreal monster world and the reality as seen by Maud's family (including her ridiculously pink, precious princess-type sister) was off-kilter. But here it's just great. You start thinking this is going to be a calamitous evening at school, and then it opens out to be much more than that, and in a very sensible (for I can't call it realistic) way. The writing is top-notch, and this is just what one would hope for from this series. It's intelligent, humorous horror for the under-tens, with beasts and surprises and inventive character detail even on the last page but one. It happily suggests this nigh-on anonymous franchise has legs – in, of course, monstrously weird amounts.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
OK, there are no monsters in it, but that's about the only flaw to be found with Pea's Book of Big Dreams by Susie Day.
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