Publisher: Darkfuse
Date of publication: April 2013
Girls & Monsters is for everyone who has ever been brave enough to confront their childhood fears...and lived to tell about it. This dark but uplifting collection of five Young Adult novellas includes:
Death Song: Liz is in love with Joe, but the monster of the lake has other plans for them.
Black Dog: Scarlet is engaged in a struggle for her sanity, but according to the voice in her head, she may be too late.
A Blue Story: When Katherine's beloved dog goes missing, she fears her strange new neighbor might be involved.
Dust Bunnies: Christiane faces her childhood arachnophobia and ends up confronting even greater fears in this test of sisterhood.
We Left at Night: Brooke and her family must abandon their home and their lives to make it out of a disease-plagued town overrun by zombies.
Girls & Monsters was an enjoyable anthology. The five stories are pretty short, so I was able to fly through the book pretty quickly. Overall, I would say that I liked the book. Some of the stories I liked more than others. I'm not sure if the author wrote these stories on order, but I felt like her writing got better as the book progressed.
For me, the best two stories out of the five were "Dust Bunnies" and "We Left at Night". Both were really creepy and had me on edge. What could creep someone out more than a creature under your bed and zombies? In both, I could feel the characters' terror and panic. Both were written very well!
Both "A Blue Story" and "Death Song" were OK for the most part. I think either of them might have been better as a longer story. I kind of felt like there was something missing in both. The time lines were off and I needed more details to really get the creep factor in the stories. The one story that I didn't care for was Black Dog. I felt like it was too abstract and confusing. I'm still not sure what was happening in it. It had great potential, but missed the mark for me.
As I said, overall, the book is not bad. I think it is OK for over 14 crowd. Why not give it a shot and see what you think?
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