Freak Street - Meet the Vampiresons product reviews

When I picked up this book, I was not sure about reading it with my daughter. She is 5 years old and I thought that Vampires might be a little bit too scary for her. However, this afternoon she insisted we read it while she had her bath. With an "I'm not scared of anything mum", we got started.

Turns out the Vampires in this book are fruitarians, only eating fruit dishes. And they have a fruit bat for a pet. So, they aren't scary at all. But they live on a street with other monsterous things.

Each page was in glossy full colour. I found this made some of the text difficult to see with my ancient 33 year old eyes. I don't think that would help a younger reader either.

The language is pretty simple. The plot didn't put me on the edge of my seat but my daughter enjoyed it. She wasn't upset when I stopped halfway through for a break though, which tells me it wasn't putting her on the edge of her seat either.

She liked the illustrations, which were bright and cartoony. But she didn't ohh and ahh like she has with other illustrated chapter books. Price-wise, not too bad considering the quality of the paper, the colour and the story is entertaining enough. It was a quick read for us, and we will probably read it again but not in a great hurry.

This is a lovely colourful book with lots of glossy cartoon type illustrations on every page. The text is small however about a 12pt font which would make it difficult to read for the age group it is aimed at. This series is aimed at children.

The book has the story of the Vampiresons who live on Freak Street with the other Freak Street families including the Zombiesons, the Aliensons and the Wizardsons. The book begins with the daughter Vonda trying to be selected to enter and then win a Junior Superchef cooking show whilst her mother makes some very cool dentures for the City Aquarium Shark that then disappear. The two subplots connect at the end and the mystery is solved. The text is interspersed with the cartoon like pictures and accompanying blurbs.

This book didn't win me over. The story was a bit all over the place and had absolutely no values or morals or any thing of substance except a ridiculous storyline... Having said that it does push the importance of fresh fruit and vegetables and the family is vegetarian.

This was a bit too advanced for my young children so I can't speak as to if this would grab the imagination of an older age group ie 8 years and up perhaps, but I am not sure that it would as I suspect that by the time you are old enough to be able to read the text you are probably a bit too advanced for the story line.

Not a book I would be buying or a series I would be looking out for.