Sci-Fi & Scary

Chicago Monsters is the next entry in the Finding Monsters series by Carine Laforest and Lucille Danis Drouot. It’s an intriguing idea – to sneakily teach kids more about famous locations under the guise of having them carefully looking for monsters hidden in the scenes. It is, indeed, an intriguing idea, but unfortunately, I wasn’t fond of the execution.

One of the biggest things that bothered me was that Chicago Monsters just abruptly ends after a beach scene. There’s no wrap up at all. Not even one of those cheesy “Congratulations, you’ve found all the monsters in Chicago” type pages. It just ends on a beach scene and that is that. I think if it had some sort of ending which officially brought things to an end, it would be a lot less jarring.

The illustrations are good. The Chicago Monsters are mostly easy to spot (as an adult at least), but there were a couple pages where I didn’t find all of them. My child successfully found all of them but one when she looked. The text included on the pages is very basic. Basically names and locations with very little other information given. This is definitely targeted at small readers and will not appeal to older children.

Disclaimer: I received a copy free from Netgalley for review consideration.