Review: Girls & Monsters by Anne Michaud

Girls & Monsters by Anne Michaud
Paperback, 194 pages
Published April 30th 2013 by DarkFuse
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This dark but uplifting collection of five Young Adult novellas includes:

Death Song: Liz is in love with Joe, but the monster of the lake has other plans for them.

Black Dog: Scarlet is engaged in a struggle for her sanity, but according to the voice in her head, she may be too late.

A Blue Story: When Katherine's beloved dog goes missing, she fears her strange new neighbor might be involved.

Dust Bunnies: Christiane faces her childhood arachnophobia and ends up confronting even greater fears in this test of sisterhood.

We Left at Night: Brooke and her family must abandon their home and their lives to make it out of a disease-plagued town overrun by zombies.

Girls & Monsters is for everyone who has ever been brave enough to confront their childhood fears...and lived to tell about it.

  

My Review:

I normally really like short stories. You get one book with lots of different stories, sometimes by different authors, but in this case they are all by the same author. There are five short stories in this book and they were hit or miss for me. So I’ll just tell you about each one and what I thought about it.

Death Song is mermaid story. It is about a girl named Liz, who lives in a trailer with her drunken father. Liz is in love with a boy named Joe, who just happens to the mayor’s son. This is a very touristy town and it is run by all the rich people. Every year some tourist goes missing and then shows up dead in the swamp a month later. The town makes money off of the memorabilia that is sold. This story really didn’t do it for me. It felt rushed to me and I feel like a little bit more description would have been nice. I did however like the evil mermaid aspect. Most people think of Ariel when someone mentions a mermaid.

Black Dog was definitely a miss for me. I actually ended up skimming until the end once I got about half way through it.  This story is about a girl named Scarlet who cuts herself and in turn loses her best friend and her boyfriend. She decides to take a trip to London to “start over”. However, the voice in her head won’t stop and finally convinces her that she is crazy. Espcially once she starts seeing the black dog that is following her everywhere. I just couldn’t get into this story. It was sort of boring to me and I just wanted to be done with it.

A Blue Story was an ok one for me. It seemed to be a really quick story. I felt that everything came together a little too easy for the main character, Katherine. This is a retelling of Blue Beard except with dogs instead of wives. Once the main characters dog goes missing she starts searching with her new boss only to find out the dog was much closer than she thought. The very end of the story was a little creepy. I’m not sure if I’m the only one that thought that.

Dust Bunnies was a weird one but I sort of liked it. Two sisters have to go to their Nana’s house after she passes away to clean it out. The main character’s name is Christiane and I never could figure out how to pronounce it.  Christiane has been afraid of the monster under the bed since her nana told her stories when she was little. Her sister thinks she is a baby but the boy who lives near her Nana’s house believes her and they set out to capture this creature, only to find something pleasantly surprising instead. I liked hearing the origins of the monster and what was really going on.

Finally, We Left At Night. This story was about a family and what happened to them during the very beginning of a Zombie virus outbreak. Brooke and her family are immune to the virus that is going around and they have to figure out what is going to happen. They are told by the government that they have to leave their home but they don’t want to go where they tell them. So they leave during the night to find safety. This one had potential to turn into a good full story. This was definitely my favorite short story of the book.

Do I Recommend this Book/Series?

I recommend picking this up for a quick easy read.

My Rating:

*This book was provided by NetGalley & the publisher in exchange for an honest review.