Los Darling

Gr 3–6—The full moon brings out all the ghouls and monsters in the forest. In the middle of the woods, there is a little hotel, run by a sweet and loving family. For various reasons, the monsters decide to spend the night at the hotel. The family invites them all to a party and the monsters are terrified. This scary, silly story is written as a play. The first quarter of the book consists of very detailed descriptions of the setting, characters, costumes, and scenes. The rest of the book is the script that consists of two acts and a total of 30 short scenes. Interspersed throughout are illustrations of cute, childlike monsters and a human family. Each group of monsters has a scene that introduces them and a scene of their reactions to the invitation to the party, which makes for monotonous and tedious reading because there are seven groups of monsters. The author's introduction explains that she wrote the play in a manner that is easily adaptable for fewer characters and scenes and that the genders of the monsters could easily be switched. The play is written for elementary school age children to read and perform so it is more humorous than scary, but it does included a scene where the character of a human child eats a zombie finger. The work is written in the "vosotros" form of Spanish.