A Celebration of Monsters

Another month, another book club meeting! This month we (me and my children, my homeschooling buddy, Julie, and her two children) read Beyond the Deep Woods by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. If you have a boy between the ages of four-twelve, you should probably put this book into his hands. Unless he doesn't like gory monsters. *chuckling* Right, right--boys and monsters just go together. As a sidenote, my daughter likes the book too.

The book isn't much on plot or moral lessons. It is about a boy, Twig, who gets lost in the extremely dangerous Deep Woods and almost dies about every fifteen pages in a variety of gruesome ways. There's a carnivorous tree, goblins, trogs, etc. Before you get too worried, I did read this to my four year old. It's not that gruesome. Just enough to keep your kids on the edge of their seats. Very fun.

Since the Deep Woods is about monsters, our book club meeting/party was monster themed. We all made individual monster pizzas. I know Emeline's looks like it is wearing a hair bow (not scary) but it is not. Those are ears (very scary).

We also made monster cupcakes.

Then we ate all the monsters. Yum, yum.

To round out the monster theme, we let the children watch Labyrinth. The small people thought it was hilarious. As do I.

It was a lovely party and a fun read-aloud. The book, Beyond the Deep Woods is available from the Davis County Library System.