Review: Fun scary tales, but not without problems
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 25, 2014
This collects the first four installments of the "Peter and the Monsters" series. Although I liked some more than others, I found them collectively to be a quite good set of stories for kids who like a little funny with their scary -- or, a little scary with their funny! -- and pretty well-written.Pillsbury is good at building up information about these characters and their world from book to book, so that while each story is self-contained, each story builds on the last and reveals little pieces of a larger arc that is sure to come to fruition later.My only real complaints are A) the pacing can be a little slow at times, B) Dill's slapstick humor occasionally goes overboard into tediousness, and C) the relative lack of female characters throughout. When there are females (Mercy Chalmers; Peter's mother and sister), they're not portrayed particularly positively. The intended audience for these stories is, say, 10 year old boys, but that's just an excuse, and not necessarily a good one.My individual ratings for these stories are mostly 4-star, but I'm rating the collected edition 3-stars due to the meta-issues listed above. This collected edition is available free. I will purchase the next collection someday, when my daughter has graduated from picture-books to short novels -- assuming the next collection fixes some of the gender problems, as I'm not sure I want her to get too invested, otherwise -- but I'm not sure whether I'll be reading more of the series just for myself.