Little Monsters Rule! By David Walliams. Illustrated by Adam Stower. HarperCollins. $9.99.
Sometimes all it takes is a party. David Walliams’ new foray into the Little Monsters world, a followup to his book called simply Little Monsters, is the usual scary-but-not-really-scary-at-all story about sort-of-monstrous-looking critters who are really adorable and who don’t want to scare but only to have fun. Like the previous book, this one leans heavily on the delightful Adam Stower illustrations to prop up a thin story that (from an adult perspective) has a number of monstrous plot holes. Stower uses the traditional trappings of modern monsterdom depiction – green scaly skin dripping something that is presumably slime, projecting teeth and a Dracula-style cape, head-to-toe mummy bandages, etc. – to create diminutive characters who are entirely too adorable to be monstrous in any way. But they are expected to be monstrous, which is the point: they are having their first day at Monster School, where older-monster students, teachers and administrators alike play cruel (ok, not that cruel) tricks on the new kids who are there, presumably, to learn to become scarier and scarier as they progress.
The new monster kid on the block here is “the littlest, cutest one, a yeti named Furball,” who looks like a cuddly plush toy (Walliams even describes him that way) but is all excited about monster lessons that will teach him how to be scary. A lot of the teaching at Monster School, though, simply involves tricking the new students (presumably to put them in a suitably bad mood), so things do not go well for Furball on the school broomstick or in the frigid waters of the school lake or, well, anywhere. Eventually catapulted (because of a trick played on him by Mr. Ogre, the headmaster) to a school nearby, Furball meets Howler, the little werewolf who starred in the first Little Monsters book, in which he decided he would rather be friendly than fearsome.
Then, together, Howler and Furball hatch a plan to “turn a nasty school nice,” which basically involves sneaking into Monster School, setting up a party, and playing music and serving treats until each Monster School monster has a “scowl turned upside down” and is engaging in dancing, fizzy-pop-induced belching, and general merrymaking. That is all it takes for the headmaster to declare that “from this day forward…Monster School will be the nicest school in the world!”
Oh, if it were only that easy. Walliams clearly wants the very young children who will enjoy this book to think it is, even laying on a rather heavy-handed moral to underline the point: “Sometimes it takes little ones like you to make the world a better place.” Of course, the prolific Walliams it too smart to write himself out of further Monster School books, revealing that all the happy partygoers have neglected to consider the frigid-lake-dwelling, still-scowling Mr. Kraken in their celebrations. But on balance, there is nothing but lightness and an upbeat tone to Little Monsters Rule! And the notion that loud-but-basically-tame parties turn grumps into happily bouncy celebrants forevermore is as amusingly superficial as readers of this book (and the adults in their lives) can expect. Kids and adults looking for a suitably superficial celebration of the pleasures of partying, as demonstrated through those unceasingly adorable Stower illustrations, will have a lot of fun with this book. But maybe, just maybe, grown-ups should keep a little residual grumpiness in their pocket while awaiting Walliams’ and Stower’s next foray into the Monster School series.
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