Tuesday Storytime: Scary Friends

It's OCTOBER!!!!

Yay!  Now I can use all my scary books and my monster books and my black cat books and my pumpkin books and really there are just too many good books to use for as few Tuesdays as there are in October.  If I had a storytime every day in October, I might get through them all.  Anyway - we start off the month gently, with a set of "scary" friends.

Leonardo the Terrible Monster
Mo Willems
ISBN: 0786852941
Willem's signature colored papers and oddly-placed figures in space.

Leonardo is a really terrible monster.  I mean, just horrible.  He can't scare anyone!  So he hatches a plan - to find a super-scaredy-cat kid and at least manage to scare ONE person.  Leonardo is so terrible at being a monster that he can't even manage that, so he makes a scary, big, decision, and finds something he can do wonderfully.



Spike, the Mixed-up Monster
Susan Hood, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
ISBN: 9781442406018
Bright colors and scribbly outlines make this fresh and energetic.  Mexican-Spanish phrases and styling.

Spike is an axolotl (its a real thing, go look it up) and he desperately wants to be a scary monster, but he's really tiny, and kindof cute.  At least, all the other creatures at the pond think so.  When a truly scary gila monster heads over, everyone else flees, and it's up to Spike to scare the other monster away!  He's never scared anyone yet - will he succeed this time?  I love that the "appearances are deceiving" message goes both ways in this story, and that Spike instantly offers help and encouragement.  A good message, with a good set of non gendered anthropomorphic characters.


Wolf's Coming!
Joe Kulka
ISBN: 9781575059303
Kulka's illustrations are dark and forboding and looming, with plenty of expressive faces.

A set of woodland creatures scurry and hide in rhyming sequences as a business-suited, square-shouldered, enormous wolf stalks through the woods, getting closer and closer to home.  A sharp eye (or multiple read-throughs) will reveal tiny little hints at a twist ending, but suffice it to say that all the build-up is for a totally different sort of shock than the kids (or parents) are expecting.