Publication Date: September 13, 2022
Rating:
Goodreads Synopsis:
Like almost everything in eleven-year-old 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, and 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 and his friends created—Eric’s life would be pretty terrible. Drawing his favorite monster battling with his best friends’ creations is the one thing that still gets Eric excited. So when his friends start to think of Monster Club as a kid’s game and 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, and suddenly, Monster Club isn’t just for fun anymore.The monsters Eric and his friends created are wreaking havoc across Coney, and it’s on the Monster Club to save their city, the amusement park, and maybe, just maybe, Eric’s family, too. It’s a hilarious, heartfelt adventure from the creative minds of Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel that fans of Last Kids on Earth and Spy School are sure to love.
Review:
What an adventure. The prologue to this book really pulls in the reader, set in Coney Island in 1949, a young boy stumbles upon a magical side-show encounter where tattoos come to life to battle. Shift to today and the modern tale of a descendant of the original side-show, Eric (aka Doodles) and his friends have a monster club where they draw monsters and have a made-up game to battle them. At first, I thought this was like little robots, but eventually it is made clear they are drawings.
Eric is going through a lot; his mom and dad have recently split up and his dad is about to lose the family's amusement park on Coney Island. Now Eric is also losing friends are they mature out of his Monster Club. Feeling a lone and acting out, he discovers a magic ink that brings drawings to life and chaos breaks loose. Eric has to be a hero for his friends and his dad's amusement park and he hopes it will solve all his problems.
I liked
how this book took real world problems and tried to solve them with fantastical
elements - like magical drawings come to life. Eric is a very real character overall;
his emotions are real, and I think anyone dealing with similar problems will
relate to him. Overall, this was a fun middle grade read with real problems,
and only some are solved through the help of magic... but be prepared for a
twist in the end - will there be a book 2?!
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