Stan and the Toilet Monster

Gr 3—5—Stan is a normal kid with a dog; a pet chameleon; and a best friend, Larry. But one day things start to go wrong. His dog flushes Fluffy down the toilet, his last baseball rolls down the sewer grate, and the neighborhood game stops while Stan and Larry climb down to get it. They return with a round, slimy object that's definitely not a baseball, so they take it to the neighborhood mad scientist, who knows what it is and tries to steal it. Everyone has heard there's a monster in the sewer, and Dr. Rrhea reveals that he's poured some failed Brussels-sprout growth formula into it. Put together a flushed chameleon and growth formula and what happens next isn't hard to guess. Readers do see Fluffy again, but she's on the attack, 20 times bigger and looking for her egg. Shreve's plot and cartoon line drawings, which appear on every page, hold the ingredients for a funny, lively story, but the characters, young and old, seem to dawdle, and the writing lacks the liveliness it needs.—Walter Minkel, Austin Public Library, TX