The League of Beastly Dreadfuls

Holly Grant's The League of Beastly Dreadfuls is a gleefully creepy comedy for 8 year olds about an ordinary girl carried off to a crumbling old asylum by two great-aunts she never knew she had.

What happens

Anastasia McCrumpet is nearly eleven. She has mousy brown hair, mousy brown eyes and exactly 127 freckles. Her morning starts with a funeral for her dad's Venus flytrap (Betty Lou, who went on hunger strike).

At school she's hauled out of class by the Monobrow, a new secretary with one enormous eyebrow. Two tiny old ladies are waiting on the steps. They say they're her great-aunts, Prim and Prude, and they're taking her to see her parents in hospital.

They don't. They take her to their house instead. It's called St. Agony's and it used to be an asylum. There's no electricity, a gardener who wears a birdcage on his head and a bedroom door that gets locked every night. And when her sweet little aunties smile, their teeth are made of metal!

The narrator talks straight to you the whole way through ("dear Reader"). It's full of silly asides, like the complaint that nobody makes a greeting card for being locked in an asylum. Kids who love a story that knows it's being told will adore it.

It's properly spooky and properly funny at the same time. Her guinea pig at home takes revenge by pooing in her shoes. Breakfast is called Mystery Lumps and smells like wet socks. And every single thing the aunties say sounds lovely and means something else.

A heads-up before you start. On her first morning at St. Agony's the aunties tell Anastasia that her mum and dad have died, and she cries in bed that night. It's in the same jokey voice as everything else, but it's still a big moment. She's also locked in, frightened and lied to by grown-ups who are meant to look after her.

If your reader is anxious about losing a parent, this probably isn't the one right now. If they like their creepy with plenty of giggles (and don't mind shouting at the aunties), they'll have a brilliant time.

What to read next

If they love a wicked grown-up and a very dark joke, try The Beast and the Bethany, about a man who looks about twenty, is really 511 and is about to do a very bad thing.