Title: The Monsters of Rookahaven
Author: Pádraig Kenny
Released: September 21st, 2021 (Hardcover)
Series: The Monsters of Rookhaven
Trigger Warnings: Animal death, blood, bones, child abuse, childbirth, death, physical abuse, spiders, war
Rating: ★★★★☆
Description: ‘Humans, as is there wont, have a terrible habit of making a mess of everything.’
Mirabelle has always known she is a monster. When the glamour protecting her unusual family from the human world is torn and an orphaned brother and sister stumble upon Rookhaven, Mirabelle soon discovers that friendship can be found in the outside world.
But as something far more sinister comes to threaten them all, it quickly becomes clear that the true monsters aren’t necessarily the ones you can see.
Please keep in mind this review contains spoilers for the entire book. Read with caution. If you click on the “Read More”, it is under the assumption you either don’t care about spoilers or you’ve already read the book!
This book was a truly joyful book to read, in all honesty. Because I do think it’s important for kids (and the adults reading this too) to understand the importance of the concept of “found family”. The illustrations are very charming and I wish I had something like this as a kid because I know I was one kid who needed to understand that while I couldn’t pick my biological family – I could choose my future family.
And that’s one of the most important messages this book has for any reader of any age. It’s delightful and deliciously creepy. However, I don’t think it’s anything overly scary that kids wouldn’t be able to handle but I will say that it would have made me a bit paranoid about why people would suddenly turn against me (a fear I’ve had since I was a kid, but for different reasons).
I do think that this is a good way to get younger readers to start considering more mature concepts and challenge them to look at the world in a different way. Personally, I do think there may be some stuff that would terrify me as a child, but kids are a lot more resilient than we think. This could introduce the gothic to kids in a way that’s easily consumable and especially with the ongoing events of the world right now (or I suppose any point in time as long as there’s war) so hopefully the younger readers won’t feel so alone.
However, I do think there were some plot points that made it hard to connect to what the author was trying to accomplish. At times, I wondered what was the glue that kept the Family together other than them suddenly appearing in the home. I loved how individualized they all were but I wanted that connection between them besides “they’re the Family” and that’s all. Sure, that may work for a biological family but I do think the themes of found family could have been stronger with that.
And because of that, the Malice character that appears is terrifying in his concept by itself but didn’t fully go all in, in my eyes. It was seemingly easier for the Malice to accomplish his goal if all his goal was to turn the Family against each other or at least, create doubt about each other. Doubt between Jem and Tom, sure, I think it would have also been stronger as well. For what we got, though, I do think it fell a little flatter in that regard. I bring up Jem and Tom because there’s this whole reasoning why they ran away in the first place only for it to be dropped, seemingly. Mostly, it felt that Jem and Tom were solely created to be the outsiders of both the Family and the village they’re in because without that, they felt pretty useless. It’s a bit worrisome but I understand why the plot shifted to the Malice but I do think it should have been a bit smoother in that regard.
Regardless, I am excited to see where the second book takes me, especially with that cliffhanger of an ending. I really do care about the Family and I want to see how these Monsters survive these new chain of events.
Astronomy Of My Dreams 