Monsters of Templeton

I originally bought The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff because I thought it might be something of a fluff book. A nice easy read. I was partially wrong.

It was an easy book to read simply becasue it flowed so well and her writing was totally captivating. But it was not fluffy. The story was deep and spanned generations with enough of the truly bizarre (a legitimate seamonster that suddenly dies and surfaces in the lake of a small town, a woman who can set fire to buildings simply by being upset, a man born so hairy that his father calls him his "little baboon"), that I was completely engrossed in it. It did take me a while to read, but that was more because of life getting in the way. Not once did I put it down because I'd had enough. The end was a wee bit "tied up with a pretty bow" but Groff made it all better with the epilogue which tells what the monster was thinking on it's last day: "fish and fish and fish and fish...." which made me giggle. (There is actually more to the epilogue, but that did it for me right there).

It might be a good book to read a second time just because there were so many characters and so much geneology that I feel like I missed a lot the first time through or that I wasn't sure which characters where related to which. I definitely recommend it though.