Encountering Chupacabra and Other Cryptids: Eyewitness Accounts (Graphic Library)

Megan Cooley Peterson is a children's book author and editor. Her book How To Build Hair-Raising Haunted Houses (Capstone Press, 2011) was selected as a Book of Note by the TriState Young Adult Review Committee.

Gr 3-5-In comic book format, each of these volumes re-creates eight or nine reported encounters with aliens, spectral figures, or cryptids. Though done by different artists, the pictures have a uniformly rough, sketchy look throughout, and the page design is unusually busy and cluttered looking. Direct quotes from eyewitnesses, printed in a different color, are mixed in with the invented dialogue. However, series title notwithstanding, those quotes are not only rare, they add little, being mostly generic comments such as "Let's get out of here!" or "Look, the doe's skull is flattened." Each incident ends with an invitation for readers to decide for themselves whether it actually happened, but no real evidence is presented either way; each volume even includes a cautionary note that eyewitness accounts "cannot be proven true or false." Weak competition for the equivalent volumes in Jennifer Rivkin's "Mysterious Monsters" (Rosen) series.α(c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.