What our educators thought

“I really enjoyed reading this! Clever, fun, scary and gorgeously illustrated. It’s definitely quite long, but it’s a brilliant book for Y6’s to get their teeth stuck into. There’s a gorgeous plot, and as my book group said, there’s enough scariness without it being terrifying. The mix of Goosebumps-esque scariness with the fun, silly humour was spot on. It can be quite hard to pitch scary books right for top end primary… and this is spot on! Hiding places and scary shadows are definitely a wonderful thing that can be used for inspiration for writing! It’s brilliantly paced and there’s some gorgeous paragraphs which we’ve looked at in class for looking at building tension and creating atmosphere. It’s modern too – with mentions of Tik Tok and cameras, which keeps it feeling in the now. The group were particularly keen on the illustrations too – definitely inspired a bit of a drawing frenzy! My girls actually took their books away and read them over a number of weeks, so each week we came back, they were all at different points… but we designed monsters, wrote short stories imagining we were stuck in one of the supermarkets around us. This was a real fun activity that I ended up using in the classroom too!