Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor

Jennifer Finney Boylan's Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor is a daft, big-hearted monster comedy for 10 year olds about a boy with one blue eye, one black eye and a pair of wings.

What happens

It opens on Monster Island, which is an amusement park for mutants. There is a Hall of Broken Mirrors, an Unhaunted House with a macabre picket fence, and Antigravity Bumper Cars. Falcon is working a lemonade stand and the sun is out.

Then a wererhino in a Yankees cap demands an egg cream, does not get one, and starts counting to three before he charges.

Within two pages a Sasquatch called Max is riding the rhino through the Hall of Boxing Robot Presidents, a robot Abe Lincoln has been launched into space, and a banshee is announcing the end of the world.

That is the register. It is very silly and it knows it.

Falcon is an angel, which sounds lovely and is actually the problem. His mother is queen of the monster killers. His father is a monster, locked in a tower. Falcon has two hearts in his chest, one from each side, and they do not always beat together.

His monster friends have started wondering whose side he is really on, because people went missing after his last adventure and did not come back.

The friends are the best thing in it. Pearl is a chupacabra the size of a pixie who announces everything as though from a stage. Max thinks their lives are unbelievably, amazingly great and eats a three-foot chili cheese dog to prove it. There is a mummy worrying that her wrappings have pizza sauce on them.

One practical thing to know first. An earlier book covers how Falcon and his friends got through their first term inside the Academy for Monsters, and this one talks about those events as though you were there. It is enjoyable without them, but your reader will meet several names as old friends.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes monsters played for laughs and a hero stuck between two families, Serwa Boateng's Guide to Vampire Hunting is a good follow-on. Serwa has been trained to fight shapeshifting vampires since before she could ride a bike, and then gets parked at her aunt's house and sent to an ordinary school.