Monster High

Just a bit of book blogging here.

When I first started in retail, before I became a pharmacy technician, I worked in the toys department. Mattel had a new line of (unrealistically skinny) fashion dolls that are supposed to be the daughters of the classic movie monsters. Frankie Stein is Frankenstein’s Monster’s daughter, Draculaura is, of course, Dracula’s daughter, Cleo deNile is the daughter of the Mummy, and Clawdeen Wolf is the daughter of the Wolfman.

There were other dolls, too, including my personal favorite, Ghoulia Yelps, who is a zombie. One of the boy dolls was Deuce Gorgon, Cleo’s boyfriend and the son of Medusa.

Mattel created two tie-in book series. One, Monster High, by Lisi Harrison, is a young adult series that includes the same characters in a different universe from the one that the dolls and tie-in web series occupy. Our POV character in this series, which begins with a book called, erm, Monster High, is a new character named Melody Carver*, whose family has moved to Salem, Oregon because the pollution in Los Angeles was bad for Melody’s asthma. Each of the four books in the series focuses on a different one of the central “ghouls” (the Monster High word for “girls”). In order, they are Frankie, Cleo, Clawdeen, and Draculaura.

The other, Ghoulfriends, is a middle-grade series by Gitty Daneshvari and that is in the same universe (or one that’s close enough to kiss) to the webisode universe. The middle-grade series is way cuter, or I guess I should say “cutesier” than the young adult series.

While going through my Goodreads account, I noticed that I had never put read dates down for either of these series. So I knocked out the first three of the young adult books pretty quickly. Going on to the first of the middle grade series too soon gave me whiplash, though, so I put it aside for a couple of weeks.

I’m going to tackle the cutesy middle grade series soon, though. I seem to recall from my first readthrough that I adapted to the cutesiness pretty quickly. I’m posting here because I’m going to start reading them tonight, December 17, 2020, and will finish this post once my brain adjusts, just so that I can memorialize the adaptation.

I’m finishing up this post now, at 2:42 am on December 20. I actually cracked the first Ghoulfriends book on December 17, then put it right back down and read another couple of books. I started it again on December 19 and just finished the first Ghoulfriends book, and I adapted to the cutesiness by Chapter 4

*Who was, unfortunately, never turned into a doll.