eARC Review of Monster Club by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel

 I received this book from Netgalley for a fair and honest review.

Title: Monster Club

Authors: Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel

Publisher: HarperCollins

Rating: 3.5 stars

Like almost everything in eleven-year-old Eric “Doodles” King’s life, King’s Wonderland—the amusement park his great-great grandfather founded—was seriously damaged when a hurricane hit his beloved Coney Island neighborhood. Now hungry property developers are circling the wreckage of the once-awesome King’s Wonderland, and Eric’s family is falling apart from the threat of losing it all.

If it weren’t for Monster Club—the epic roleplaying game that Eric and his friends created—Eric’s life would be pretty terrible. Drawing his favorite monster battling with his best friends’ creations is the one thing that still gets Eric excited. So when his friends start to think of Monster Club as a kid’s game and get more interested in other things, Eric just can’t deal. But then Eric happens across a long-lost vial of magic ink that brings their monster drawings to life, and suddenly, Monster Club isn’t just for fun anymore.

The monsters Eric and his friends created are wreaking havoc across Coney, and it’s on the Monster Club to save their city, the amusement park, and maybe, just maybe, Eric’s family, too. 

Eric's life sort of revolves around a game him and his friend Yoo Hoo made up when they were a few years younger and they have been playing it awhile and added some players. It's all about drawing your own monsters and having battles kind of in a D&D fashion with a few other games thrown in. They eventually added some friends and players. 

Now those friend are starting to feel they are a bit to old to be playing such games and this hits Eric hard especially since his family is going through a rough patch because of King's Wonderland being hit bad by a hurricane and it's his fathers legacy and he is deterimed to bring it back while Eric's mother sees no hope and they constantly fight. 

When Eric gets in a bit fight with his friends and gets detention his mother takes all his art supplies away as punishment but Eric finds some ink that could have some magical qualities that are interesting at first but then turn horrible.

This was a decent story about a friend group and growing up, but for a book that was called Monster Club I was expecting a bit more monster. It took probably halfway or more before the fun monster stuff happened and then not long for that to get out of control and pick up the pace of the book, so to me the beginning just lagged a bit. Oh and way to much fart type jokes. 

I also kept thinking in the back of my mind that I had read something similiar to this and I had it was called Monsters Unleashed so it's not a very original monster drawings come to life story. Overall though I thought it was a decent enough read and think young readers would enjoy it.