Dear Mrs. Zrihen,
I have been reading a collection of short stories titled Young Monsters edited Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. It is a collection of short stories about kids who are also monsters. Here is a quote from the book. It is from the story, “One for the Road” by Steven King. It appears on pages 205 and 206:
“She held out her arms at me and smiled. “Pick me up, mister,” she said softly. “I want to give you a kiss. Then you can take me to my mommy.”
I didn’t want to, but there was nothing I could do. I was leaning forward, my arms outstretched. I could see her mouth opening. I could see little fangs inside the pink ring of her lips. Something slipped down her chin, bright and silvery, and with a dim, distant faraway horror, I realized she was drooling.
Her small hands clasped themselves around my neck and I was thinking: Well, maybe it won’t be so bad, not so bad, maybe it won’t be so awful after a while – when something black flew out of the Scout and struck her on the chest. There was a puff of strange-smelling smoke, a flashing glow that was gone and instant later, and then she was backing away, hissing. Her face was twisted into a vulpine mask of rage, hate, and pain. She turned sideways and then…then she was gone. One moment she was there and the next there was a twisting knot of snow that looked a little bit like a human shape. Then the wind tattered it away across the fields.
“Booth!” Tookey whispered. “Be quick, now!”
And I was. But not so quick that I didn’t have time to pick up what he had thrown at that little girl from hell. His mother’s Douay Bible.”
I picked this passage because it is the only part of the story that gets good. The significance of the passage is to probably get the reader interested at some point.
The two before reading strategies I used were to skim and scan and two to read the synopsis. The two during reading strategies I used were to understand the words in the story and to review what I had read every time I finished a story. My two after reading strategies were to review everything I read after the reading session and to prepare for Reader’s Journal.
The genre of this book science fiction and the characteristics are boring. As you can see, I did not enjoy this book because each of the stories had a lame plot structure. I never found one of the stories that were good. There are multiple characters in each story and most of them were round. There were multiple places in each story. The plot structure varied from story to story. The conflict in every story was man vs. the supernatural because many of the characters had problems with monsters. The tone of the stories was spooky. The moods changed from story to story. The theme of all of these stories is that monsters come in all shapes and sizes and you never know when one will jump out at you. There was no moral in any of the stories. The point of view of every story was third person except for “One for the Road”, which was first person. The pattern of organization is cause and effect because the cause is a character does something wrong and the effect is they run into a monster. The authors’ purposes were to get money, which they didn’t. The authors’ perspectives are definitely not agreeing with this book because they know that monsters don’t really exist.
I would rate this book a zero out of ten because it was horrible. I barely noticed any creative hooks that got me interested. I would not recommend this book to anyone, period.
Sincerely,
Michael
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