The Monsterator is a worthy add to your child’s book shelf

Our criteria for a great good-night book are that it should be short enough to read a couple of times and have great illustrations.  If it has rhyming words in it then it’s bonus.  The Monsterator by Keith Graves meets all of those and more.  It was immediately enjoyed by everyone in the house for several reasons.

When I first saw the book I thought that it was too thick to be enjoyed.  After thumbing through it I realized that the last 30% of the pages were monsterated and that the pages were very good stock and thus, thicker than normal.  The final pages have a head, torso, hips and legs all with separate bodies and styles so readers can monsterize the character once you’re done with the book.

Oh, this is a gimmick I thought before I read the book to our 5 year old.

Sure that end bit is gimmicky, but our kids love that part of The Monsterator.  Do they like the book to get to the end where they can play or just like the book and the monsterized pages at the end are a bonus?

Either way our kids love the book and my wife likes reading it to them also.

The story is about a normal young boy named Edgar Dreadbury who doesn’t like Halloween because all of the costumes are lame.  He goes to a new costume shop and finds a mysterious device called Monsterator.  After putting money in the machine he turns into a jumbled up scary creature that goes on to scare everything in town that Halloween night.

“I’ll return to the monsterator and put it in reverse.  I’ll turn back into me and will look none the worse”, Edgar said at the end of the night.

Most of the dialogue is very short, to the point and rhymes like that.  That type of dialogue is the best to read aloud because you can really get into a character and have fun with it.  At the end of the book young Edgar is unable to change back but relishes his new life in scaring children as they come to his house on Halloween.  In the Monsterator monsterizing pages you can make 626 monsters, so it is easy to see how kids can get sucked into that.

The pictures in The Monsterator are big, fun and have a nice dreamy landscape when it’s called for.  It’s one of those rare children’s books that you read and just smile when you do so.  This is a Halloween book that you’ll enjoy reading year-round.