Tuesday Storytime: Monster Families

I love October.  Halloween for weeks on end.  We have spooky books up on display, and I get to read about monsters and mummies and zombies to impressionable kids from now til November.

Zombelina
Kristyn Crow, illustrated by Molly Idle (Flora and the Flamingo)
ISBN: 9780802728036
Way too sweet to be scary.  A zombie girl learns to be a ballerina, and tackles stage fright.

Previously reviewed here.  Still love it, still the sweetest story, but this time around the theme hit more solidly on the family support of her passion.


Where's My Mummy?
Carolyn Crimi (Rock n' Roll Mole), illustrated by John Manders
ISBN: 9780763643379
Woefully undersized hardcover edition has a cute little mummy meeting traditional "monsters."

Despite using and loving this book, I've somehow managed to not review it yet!  This is a cute little "reversal of expectations" book.  Little mummy is playing hide-and-shriek (which really, with small kids, is roughly the truth) with his mommy mummy, but she's either too busy or really incompetent at the game, so he's off searching in various scary environments for her.  First the graveyard, where he meets Bones, then the swamp where he meets the Blob, then a dark cave where he finds Drac.  The pint-sized roly-poly mummy child is totally unimpressed with seeing these friends or neighbors, who are all prepping for bed themselves (brushing teeth, washing faces and ears) but warn the little tyke of "things" that lurk in the darkness.  Pooped, with still no mommy mummy, he rests at the base of a tree until a mouse appears.  THAT's the scare-jump all the parents were waiting for, and mommy mummy is immediately there to rescue, comfort, and take to bed.  ADORABLE.

Goodnight, Little Monster
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Bonnie Leick
ISBN: 9780761456834
Sweet lush soft-edged watercolor-looking illustrations of an adorable baby monster at bedtime.

This is such a sweet book, but I have a hard time reading it because the endpapers are COVERED in giant nasty spiders.  I "screwed my courage to the sticking place" as best I could, because it really is a sweet story, and because I more often read the slightly sillier and more upbeat My Monster Mama Loves Me So, but I did that one too recently to repeat.  So, I braved the spiders, and had two mamas ask me if they could have the book afterwards.  Courage is rewarded!  In the story, mama is putting baby to bed, and it's just as traditional and standard as you could ask: from bathtime to bedtime snack to toothbrushing to the under-bed-monsters (er, children) check, and the temporary forgetting of the nightlight.  The pictures really are sweet, once you get past all the spiders.