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J. Patrick Lewis and Kenn Nesbitt's Bigfoot is Missing is a book of sneaky monster poems for 7 year olds, and half the fun is working out where each poem is hiding.
Nearly every page is a different creature from legend. There's Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, the Kraken, a Goatman with an axe and a spitting red worm from the Mongolian desert.
None of them is written out like a normal poem though. Bigfoot's is on the side of a milk carton under MISSING (last seen walking in the forest, shoe size 92). Nessie's is a WARNING sign by the loch, signed by the management. The Goatman's is a police officer's notebook, and the crime is head-butting a car.
Others turn up as a wanted poster, a TV news flash, a text-message chat, a zoo sign, newspaper adverts and a can of Moth-Away spray (it keeps all ten-foot moths at bay). The Giant Anaconda gets a road sign with the hissing running on for three whole lines.
Reading it is a bit like a treasure hunt. There's no story to follow and nobody to keep track of. Your reader opens a page, finds the words tucked into the picture and works out the joke. Who'd have thought a milk carton could be a poem?
Some poems are in big capitals on a sign. Others are in small print or text speak (smthg, shld), which a newer reader might want a hand with. A child on their own can get through it in one sitting. It's even better shared, because lots of the jokes are in the pictures.
A short page at the start explains what a cryptid is, an animal nobody has proved is real. At the back there are notes on every creature and where it's said to live. Three are British, Black Shuck the ghost dog of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, the Beast of Bodmin Moor and Nessie.
The humour is quite dark in places. A news ticker says a tribesman's head is still missing. The chupacabra's poster is about goats' blood, there are bones in a bear's cage and one text chat stops mid-word when something scratches at the door. Nothing gory is drawn, but a child who gets spooked at bedtime might want a grown-up nearby.
If they're after more creatures you'd never want to meet, all in rhyme, try Roald Dahl's Dirty Beasts. A crocodile creeps up the stairs at bedtime and a very clever pig works out exactly what the farmer keeps him for.
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