The Legend of Shadow High

Shannon Hale and Dean Hale's The Legend of Shadow High is a funny fantasy for 9 year olds in which the monsters of Monster High and the fairytale pupils of Ever After High find out the other lot are real.

What happens

Frankie Stein and Draculaura are having a terrible week. Their big history presentation ends with loose scorpions, a teacher frozen in a block of ice and a swamp-monster-shaped hole in the classroom door. They need a brand new topic, fast.

Then Draculaura finds an old, blank book in her dad's library with two words on the cover. Shadow High. Every grown-up they ask seems just about to remember something, until a mysterious plopping noise distracts them. (Your reader will work out what's making it long before Frankie and Drac do!)

Meanwhile, at Ever After High, Raven Queen is trying very hard to keep her head down. That's tricky when the Evil Queen is your mum, and a tiny crack has just appeared in her mirror prison.

The real star is the narrator. Brooke Page is a trainee Narrator telling her very first story, and she's a HUGE fan of everyone in it. She whispers to your reader in footnotes, fangirls over Maddie Hatter and argues with her own parents, who really don't want this story told at all.

It's all very silly and packed with puns (ghoulfriends, hextbooks, Chemythstry). If your reader already knows these characters they'll be thrilled to see them meet. If not, don't worry. Brooke explains everything as she goes, usually with a joke.

It's quick and light, and it hops happily between the two schools. Underneath the jokes there's a sweet thread about friendship too. Frankie spent her early life alone in a lab and still worries about letting her best friend down. Who hasn't made a mess of something because they were trying too hard to be amazing?

What to read next

If Raven and Apple are the ones your reader loves, go back to where their school story began with The Storybook of Legends, which opens on the day the Ever After pupils sign up to relive their parents' fairytales.