By Jim Benton
A girl who'd rather build monsters than make friends tries acting normal at her new school, then a monster made of cafeteria lunch turns out to be a problem only her mad science can fix.
Franny K. Stein loves everything dark and creepy, and most of all she loves her experiments. Her bedroom is a full laboratory, her lab assistant is a dog she built herself, and she'd pick a bubbling beaker over a birthday party any day. Then she starts at a new school where everyone is sunny and ordinary, nobody laughs at her creepy inventions the right way, and she decides to pack the mad scientist away and just be normal. It works until the cafeteria's mystery lunch goo starts to bubble, grows into a giant monster, and goes stomping through the school. The one person who can stop it is the exact mad scientist Franny had been trying to hide.
If your child gravitates to the science shelf, Franny is a way into a story: she actually experiments, testing and tinkering and building her way out of trouble, so the way of thinking they like from nonfiction shows up here in a plot. Jim Benton drew a cartoon on nearly every page, so it moves fast, stays funny, and never turns into a wall of words. And it's the first of a series, so if Franny clicks, there are more books waiting.