No Zombies Allowed - Hardcover

Matt Novak has written and illustrated many books, among them The Robobots, The Pillow War, and Elmer Blunt's Open House. His Mouse TV was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and Newt received an IRA Children's Choice Award.

Matt has been a puppeteer, a teacher, and a Disney artist. He and his family now live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Kindergarten-Grade 2-Witch Wizzle and Witch Woddle's annual monster bash is plagued by party planning's primary predicament: the guest list. Looking at photos that help them recall a slew of unsavory incidents from the previous year, the hostesses decide to ban former guests, such as the zombies for dropping their eyeballs into the punch bowl and the werewolves for coughing up furballs. Also struck from the invitation list: swamp creatures, skeletons, ghosts, and vampires. Still on the banning bandwagon, the two set their sights on a couple of witches that had turned their guests into frogs. But pictures don't lie, and they discover that the spell casters were none other than themselves. Novak's fondness for silliness is put to good use in his dual role as author and illustrator. The text is engaging, the dialogue is ironic, and the characters are true to form. The watercolor illustrations are bright and eye-catching, and the cheerfully depicted creatures will be nonthreatening to the youngest listeners. New readers will find plenty of white space around the text to help them focus on the words, with the art complementing the action. The two witches learn a good lesson about the social hazards of being exclusionary: it takes all kinds to make the monster world go around, even zombies and werewolves.
Carol L. MacKay, Camrose Public Library, Alberta, Canada
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