The monster story-teller

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Shannon Hale & Dean Hale

Today is Princess Magnolia’s birthday party, and she wants everything to be perfect. But just as her guests are arriving . . . Brring! Brring! The monster alarm! Princess Magnolia runs to the broom closet, ditches her frilly clothes, and becomes the Princess in Black! She rushes to the goat pasture, defeats the monster, and returns to the castle before her guests discover her secret. But every time Princess Magnolia is about to open her presents, the monster alarm rings again. And every time she rushes back—an inside-out dress here, a missing shoe there—it gets harder to keep the other princesses from being suspicious. Don’t those monsters understand that now is not a good time for an attack?

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Tony Ross

After eating all the planets in outer space, a horrible monster gets a big surprise when it comes to Earth and tries to capture a little boy.

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Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

**STORIES BY M. T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nathan Ballingrud, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Dylan Horrocks, Nik Houser, Kathleen Jennings, Alice Sola Kim, Joshua Lewis, Kelly Link, Patrick Ness, and G. Carl Purcell** **P**redatory kraken that sing with--and for--their kin; band members and betrayed friends who happen to be demonic; harpies as likely to attract as repel. Welcome to a world where humans live side by side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you'll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these and monsters that defy categorization, some of today's top authors for young adults explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and revenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders. As in their acclaimed and award-winning anthology *Steampunk!*, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have brought together fifteen of the premier voices in speculative fiction to explore the intersection of fear and love--where the monsters within meet, and sometimes blue into, the monsters without--in a haunting, at times hilarious, darkly imaginative volume. This description comes from the publisher.

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Geraldine McCaughrean

Eleven-year-old Phelim and his companions, a Maiden, a Fool, and a strange black Horse, journey to the Stoor Worm's lair to destroy the long-forgotten Worm and its Hatchlings, who have been roused from their slumber by the sounds of war.