by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 26, 2010

The hardest part about reading this book to your children might be having to explain to them what a mummy is. "I love monsters and all things Halloween," the author explains on the book's jacket. "In fact, if I were President of the World I would make Halloween a weekly event." In her story, "Little Baby Mummy" doesn't want to go to bed in the house where he lives with "Big Mama Mummy," which is described as a "deep, dark place." This is author Carolyn Crimi way of avoiding admitting that the family is living in a tomb.

For some reason, the baby doesn't want to go to bed in his tomb - yet - and asks his mom to play "Hide and Shriek" one more time. "Count your bandages while I hide!" he says, and then runs off to hide in a nearby cemetery. "He looked over graves and he looked over tombs, but Big Mama Mummy was nowhere to be found," Crimi writes. And then the mummy hears an ominous "Clank clink clank woo boo woo," and then a skeleton leaps out of the woods!

Fortunately, the skeleton is really funny looking, since he's wearing a yellow bathrobe over purple boxer shorts covered with pictures of dice. He's brushing his teeth with a green liquid - the story says he eventually "gargled with goo" - but the mummy stares, scowling, since the skeleton is not his mother. You have to give a lot of credit to illustrator John Manders, who makes all the monsters in this book look cute. At the "slithery swamp," there's a green monster named Glob who bursts up from the deep - but he just looks jowly and overweight, with silly big eyes. And when Dracula shows up, he's just cleaning his pointy ears with a handkerchief!

Crimi and Manders had previously worked together on a funny parody of pirates that used rabbits - Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies. But the story for this book seems a little derivative, since I'm pretty sure I've seen this format before. (A young character travels around asking all the wrong people the same question...) Most of the humor in this book comes from the way Manders draws the exasperated expression on the little mummy's face. But eventually he does meet a creature who frightens him: a tiny mouse poking it's head out of a tree trunk.

"I'm here," says his mother mummy - and then she takes him home and tucks him in bed.

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