The unscary book by Nick Bland
Scholastic, 2018. ISBN 9781742994147
(Age: 4+) Highly recommended. Themes: Monsters, Humour. Our hero is
all dressed up to scare the living daylights out of the reader. He
has a donned a skeleton costume, a hat with a row of teeth, large
furry slippers and googly eyes sprouting from his head - all things
to provoke and scare. But each time he brings something else into
the picture he is trying to create, something very unscary enters.
Told to expect something scary, readers will laugh with anticipation
and then surprise as he whisks aside the red sheet to reveal an
apple tree not a monster, nothing scary at all. He tries again,
pulling down the blue curtain covered in stars, expecting a monster,
but a rainbow appears. Then a bunch of rabbits hop into the picture.
Frustrated he calls again for a terrifying thing, only to have an
ice cream vendor come onto the page. By now with his hands on his
hips, he declaims loudly how he wanted this to be a scary book, full
of horrifying and terrifying things, aiming to scare the readers,
not make them hungry for an ice cream, or look at a bunch of cute
rabbits. Each page rings with his frustration, so after another
attempt, his grandma rides across the page, he has had enough, and
drags a monster onto the page. The monster unhappily scares everyone
else away, but our hero is happy that he now has something scary to
show the reader, although the monster is not as scary as he wishes
him to be.
A delightfully funny story of not getting what you want, of
frustration at things not working out as you intended, this tale
will resonate with younger children who will recognise exactly what
the boy feels.
Bland creates a wonderful mix of the scary and unscary, using words
in a different type to entertain the reader and make them aware of
the meanings of some of these new words. In the background can be
seen parallel stories: his dog loves the apple tree, digging around
its roots and finding a bone, the rabbits eat all the apples, going
to great lengths to get the last one on the tree. Readers will love
the humour, picking out details on each page, watching the antics of
all the other characters on each page.
Fran Knight