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Oct 23, 2017MelissaBee rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Emil Ferris' "My Favorite Thing is Monsters" is a vividly illustrated murder mystery narrated by a precocious, artistic child who inhabits a world populated by monsters. In her loving but secretive home in the basement of a cheap Chicago apartment building, which she shares will her ill mother and her protective older brother, Karen tries to summons the hidden, misshapen monsters that appear in her comics, her movies, and her dreams. She pictures herself as one of them while also feeling sorely dispossessed of their imagined powers--immortality, the freedom to express dark emotions, and their knowledge of the deeply held secrets hidden at the core of other beings. In Karen's outside world, the volatile days of the late sixties, there are many monsters who freely roam the streets disguised as humans, though they are sorely lacking in humanity. While Karen draws herself and her protective friend Franklin as a werewolf and Frankenstein respectively, they are the ones who are often left unprotected and are terrorized by vicious kids and adults alike. Karen is attracted to solving the mystery of her upstairs neighbor Anna's tragic death. As she listens to Anka's previously recorded interviews detailing her own tragic childhood among her own monsters, Karen intuits that solving Anka's murder may provide the key to surviving in her own uncertain world. This reader was as mesmerized by the richly cross hatched drawings rendered in almost psychedelic bic pen colors as she was by the emerging clues Karen gathers from Anka's tragic story to overheard conversations, and greek mythology and classical paintings. Trigger Warning and Spoiler Alert Below: (This story includes images and stories of child sexual abuse and prostitution as well as the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.) Edit Delete