FICTION

Spider Sandwiches

by Claire FREEDMAN
illus. by Sue Hendra & Paul Linnet. 32p. Bloomsbury. Jul. 2014. Tr $14.99. ISBN 9781619633643; ebk. $8.99. ISBN 9781408839133. LC 2013034319.
COPY ISBN
PreS-Gr 1—Max the monster has an appetite for anything gloopy, gunky, and gross. He starts his day with toenail scrambled eggs and a crushed-grasshopper-legs smoothie, and for lunch he eats multicolored lice rice. He cooks slimed-eel noodles from Squealia's Monsters' Cookbook and buys treats like rat's-tail pizza and blue-mold chips at the grocery store. Squiggly spider sandwiches are his favorite. The only thing the seeming omnivore emphatically turns down is…green sprout soup. Although the rhyming pattern isn't consistent throughout, on most of the pages, the second and fourth line rhyme. Hendra and Linnet's digital illustrations and glittery cover offset the story's gross-out factor. The monster and bugs are cute. Teeth are rounded and eyes are wide open. A humorous introduction to eating habits and preferences.—Tanya Boudreau, Cold Lake Public Library, AB, Canada
Max is a young monster with an appetite for gross foods, especially spider sandwiches. But even this adventurous eater won't touch Brussels sprouts. Colorful Photoshop illustrations set off by black backgrounds and a laundry list of disgusting dishes will please a young audience, but an unsteady rhyme scheme and the tired anti-vegetable joke flatten the effect.
Reviewed by Tanya Boudreau , Jun 01, 2014

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