The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless

Marketing and design teams have gone crazy over this book; perhaps more attention could have been paid to the writing. Minerva and her brother Max discover really quite late in life that their family are monsterminators. It’s not clear why relatively intelligent children haven’t previously tumbled to the existence of monsters or wondered what their parents do for a living. Managing to hide their knowledge from their dad for a couple of years, Max and Minerva educate themselves in monster ways, which comes in handy when they have to rescue their dad from the evil Zarmaglorg. Along the way, they defeat various other monsters, with the help of a talking book and a white coyote which turns out to be their part-monster great-great-great-grandfather.

Such a peculiar book could have been gloriously eccentric, but unfortunately this is merely pedestrian. Zappa handles what plot there is badly. Great attention is paid to monsterminating fights that are extremely similar to each other, while important pieces of information are passed over in a phrase. It’s hard to tell any of the characters apart, human or monster, and they don’t elicit much sympathy. There is a high gross factor which will undoubtedly appeal to little boys (and little girls) but even they may find the book repetitive. For example, descriptions of monsters and charms to ward them off are inserted into the book every so often. These entirely lack the knowing humour which makes Rowling’s magical world so memorable and the same phrases and jokes are used again and again. The book is illustrated partly by the author with very childish drawings, partly with slightly disturbing photos. Not destined to be a classic, but probably has passing appeal.