Big Foot and Little Foot – The Monster Detector

Ellen Potter's Big Foot and Little Foot, The Monster Detector is a warm, funny chapter book for 7 year olds about a young Sasquatch and the human boy who is already his best friend when it starts.

What happens

Hugo lives in apartment 1G at the back of Widdershins Cavern with his parents and his big sister Winnie. He has spent three years collecting Monster Card wrappers, a hundred of them, and posted them off for the special prize.

The prize arrives. It is small, it says FRAGILE, and inside is a wooden square with a glass window and five weechie-weechie moths behind it. When a monster is close, they flap, and it clicks.

It clicks almost straight away, near a sealed-off room at the west end of the cavern with green fur on the floor and a pile of small bones in the corner. Hugo's friend Gigi goes quiet. Her grandmother told her about the Green Whistler. It whistles just before it pounces, and there is a rumour it ate young Sasquatches.

While all that is brewing, Boone walks into the Academy for Curious Squidges and announces he would like to come to school there. Boone is a human. No human ever has.

This is what the book is really about, and it is handled beautifully. Boone knows his state capitals and has brought his own lunch, but he does not know what a snud is, and the whole class turns round to stare. Then he shows them his cryptid cards, and one of them has a Sasquatch on it, roaring, dripping, holding a club. "But we don't eat people," says Pip, in a hurt little voice.

Hugo gets the best line in it. A monster, he reckons, is just a creature you have never seen and are a little bit afraid of, and once you actually meet it, it is sort of regular. But better.

The voice is a treat. There is a narrator who talks straight to your reader, gets embarrassed on Hugo's behalf and admits when Hugo is only mostly brave rather than totally brave. The chapters are short, and the whole story finishes inside this one book, which matters a lot at this age.

No warnings on this one. There is a proper scare in the middle and it resolves kindly, and the unkindness that does show up, a child flatly refusing to sit next to somebody, is the point of the story rather than an accident in it.

What to read next

If a child who sticks up for strange creatures is what appeals, Sasquatch and the Muckleshoot is in the library too. A very secret society heads out west to keep the film crews and the chainsaws away from whatever is moving about in the forest.