Customer Reviews
This was everything I hoped it would be. The illustrations really brought this to the next level. The adult characters and plot lines were relatable without being too over the top for kids. Really fun read that will tug on all your heart strings! Some nice surprises along the way!
Monster Club is a fast pace middle-grade novel filled with action and incredible monsters. Think Pokemon meets Holochess. What if... your monster/character (from your childhood game) could become alive and challenge other doodles who come alive to a fight?This is also a story of growing up, family relationships (divorce, intense mom) changing or reinventing priorities with friends (no longer they have the same interests/ cliche bullying character), and starting to be active in the community (trying to save the theme park).Can't wait for the next book.
Wow! What a wild, imaginative, fun ride! Had such a great time with this! Like almost everything in Eric “Doodles” King’s life, King’s Wonderland—the amusement park his great-great grandfather founded—was seriously damaged when a hurricane hit his beloved Coney Island neighborhood. Now hungry property developers are circling the wreckage of the once-awesome King’s Wonderland, & Eric’s family is falling apart from the threat of losing it all.If it weren’t for Monster Club—the epic roleplaying game that Eric & his friends created—Eric’s life would be pretty terrible. Drawing his favorite monster battling with his best friends’ creations is the 1 thing that still gets Eric excited. So when his friends start to think of Monster Club as a kid’s game & get more interested in other things, Eric just can’t deal. But then Eric happens across a long-lost vial of magic ink that brings their monster drawings to life, & suddenly, Monster Club isn’t just for fun anymore.The monsters Eric & his friends created are wreaking havoc across Coney, & it’s on the Monster Club to save their city, the amusement park, & maybe, just maybe, Eric’s family, too. This is full of great life lessons/messages about change, letting go of what you thought life was going to look like 1 way & adjusting to it going in another direction & accepting it, change in general, & dealing with our inner monsters. Friendships are a big thing that change for kids over time. As you grow up interests change, & the people you gravitate to change. Also, families can change. Whether it’s growing, or separating/divorcing. All hard life events for any kid. So very relatable with that, plus some bullying aspects in here as well. The whole back story of the park, the family, the monsters-loved it. Highly creative & unique. I fell so in love with these monsters alone, not to mention their kid artists. The ending was o good! The epilogue also left me VERY eager for the next book! BEAUTIFUL cover & illustrations sprinkled throughout inside by Ronald Kurniawan as well.💜
I used to be a teacher. Way back when I started college, I wanted to go into education because I loved reading and I wanted to help the next generation discover the joy of reading as well. I have a degree in elementary education, and I was certified to teach K-8, with certifications in language arts, social studies, and science in grades 6-8. My first job was a language arts/social studies mix, which I truly loved. I went back and forth between language arts and social studies for most of the ten years I spent as a classroom teacher, eventually leaving the profession because I kept getting pushed into teaching life science classes. I never took life science classes in college, my science background was always geology and earth science, yet somehow the state determined I was qualified to explain the innards of a frog. Nope. It’s hard to teach something to a room full of apathetic middle schoolers if you are not intensely passionate about the subject, so I decided to go ahead and bail (that’s pretty much the exact phrase I used when I officially resigned). Despite no longer teaching middle school language arts, I continue to love middle level and young adult literature. I actively seek out award winning books, and I will absolutely read a book recommended to me by a child. This one popped up as one of Good Morning America’s buzzreads, so I happily dug in. The premise of the story is pretty intriguing. This group of artistic kids created a game around their monster drawings, it was pretty ingenious. Magic ink eventually brings those monsters to life, which unsurprisingly creates mayhem. The book is written in language that will be easy to follow in the middle levels—fourth through eight grade, but I do believe the story itself is definitely better suited to the lower half of those grades. Seventh graders hate everything, and eighth graders are “too mature” for kids’ books. After I finished, I doubled down on the grade recommendations. This book is far more suited for third to fifth grade than the middle grades.
My very picky reader loves this book. It’s fun and interesting and caught his attention from the very first page. Please write more! He can’t put it down!
