First off, the illustrations are wonderful. So colorful and vibrant. The story matches. I like the back matter of the book as well.

Fist off, if you are an adult this is not the book for you. If you are a card carrying member of the RL Stein Fan club, then you may enjoy this title.

Five different kids are called to a haunted house in the middle of nowhere. Each one showed up because of a different ruse. One thinks she going to meet her mom, another set of twins think they are going to shoot a movie, one thinks they are going to an exclusive music camp. All they know is that they have shown up at a house and there are no adults.

Overall this is not an in-depth book, or even something that stands well on its own. What brings the life into this book the the Scholastic app. Normally Scholastic does a website for a book like this, but this time it has done an app. I am not a fan of an app because it puts content out of the reach of many. The app lets the reader go through the haunted house, discover clues etc. Scholastic has had luck in this format before (39 Clues, Spirit animals, etc). It's okay here. Over all the story is not bad, but if you can not do the app, it looses a lot.

Earlier I compared it to Goosebumps, and while it would fall in the same category, for the same age groups, it misses the fun of Goosebumps. It misses the silly. And I think in the end, this will make this book a miss with most.

The good: the patterns are great. The page layout of the pattern pages are good. The Alice in Wonderland story is abridged but it works. I really like the mix of the two together.

The bad and the ugly. Let's talk about the pictures. They are horrible. The shadows are so big it makes everything look like an amature publication. The only thing worse than the shadows is when the shadows are cut off. If it was once, okay maybe so it could fit on the page. But there are pages with nothing but one picture and the large shadow is chopped. FIX it before it's published.

I really like the book for the end. In the beginning I was a little confused, but it all worked out in the end. The other thing I like about this book is the the characters are POC. That is sorely lacking in picture books.

This series does not fall to the second book slump. It's fun and entertaining, and has a great message.

Okay i tried this as an audio book and I had to bale. The reader has this fake southern accent that is nauseating to listen to. If it is a real southern accent, then where did she live. I think I may have enjoyed this book if I had tried reading it first, but It was not good as an audio book.

So I read this book as a digital galley and I think there are still some words missing. You can tell from the title that the town’s message to a little girl with a bird problem is Stop Feedin’ da Boids, but it is never said. Not only that, there seems to be a disconnect from the first half of the book and the last half. After the townspeople get involved with the birds, the little girl gets a fish tank, and then a larger one, and then it is like it never mattered in the first place. It’s just odd.

This simple story relies heavily on its illustrations to tell the story. Two boys live in a concrete jungle, complete with 13 blades of grass, and one small tree. When these boys find this tree, it is the first that they have ever seen. So they ride long and hard to save this tree. Not as successful, or catchy as the Lorax, but it does a good of illustrating a treeless world.

This simple story is a look at how various animals are different, and how they can also be the same. For example (not from the book) a dog is different from a cat, which is different from a mouse, and also different from a monkey. But they all have tails. This books looks at the way various animals are alike. The illustrations are fine, just not Caldecott fine.

This is a nice book about how things humans like to do, are often done by animals as well. Bees dance, Gazelle play tag, there is is even a type of frog that likes to blow bubbles. And interesting cross between picture book, and nonfiction book. It works quite well.