Theodora Hendrix: A Fun Chapter Book for Young Readers

It’s a great feeling for parents, educators and most of all, children, when they can comfortably carry around a chapter book. Those first and second graders might carry around Dog Man, but it probably belongs to their older sibling. It’s in late second grade, third grade and hopefully by fourth grade when kids start carrying books like Theodora Hendrix and the Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle. That’s an alliteration in case you’re reviewing that term for seventh-grade ELA. This is second entry in a ridiculously fun chapter-book series that run with silly characters, age-appropriate monsters, and just enough evil to thrill ages 7-10.

We meant to read the first one in the Theodora Hendrix book series but didn’t. That’s important to point out because the second one in the series, the Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle, is very easy to catch onto. It picks up shortly after the event of the first book where Hendrix had problems at school with her headmaster and some schoolmates. She also had to deal with the monsters in her house. The monsters are in her family. She’s the sole human in a family of monsters like a mummy, werewolf, vampire, ogre, spiders, and more.

They make up the MLM, Monstrous League of Monsters, a group of monsters that aren’t that evil or beastly acting at all, kind of. The monsters still want evil and ugly things, but in their world it’s normal. Spider webs are expected, dark drapes are the norm, doors should creak when you open them and drinks are better when they have a reptile’s tail slithering out of the glass. All of the monster gags and inverse expectations are played for laughs and will amuse middle to upper-elementary school readers.

 Each chapter is nine or ten pages and has a halfway point that’s marked by an illustration of three bats. The Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle is also loaded with illustrations. Approximately 75% of the pages have at least one illustration of a crypt, monster gathering, human misunderstanding, or creepy critter doing something`nefarious. A couple of the pages are mostly illustrated that show characters trying to stab others in the back or sneaking around a graveyard at night.

Kids at this age need illustrations to help make the medicine go down. They might be reluctant readers and those illustrations help make the books just a bit more palatable. It lessens the intimidation factor and allows the words to entertain on their own. The text is written at a level that every fourth-grader, some third graders and a couple of second-grade students will be able to read it without assistance. Those ages that are able to handle a read-aloud book, that doesn’t have large-scale illustrations, will also enjoy its silliness and soft lessons.

The lessons in Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle are so soft that kids won’t even realize that a moral is being taught. Not judging others is a big one that is cut both ways, from the kids learning that they can trust their supposed adult foe, to the kids reaching out and accepting the help that they need from the school’s antagonists. The turning of the heel, if that heel is set up to be a bad enough character is very fun to read, and the ones in Cursed Beetle are fun and just enough ‘bad’ to make elementary readers high-five each other with their plans or foiled and everyone works together.

Theodora Hendrix and the Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle is the second entry in the Theodora Hendrix series. Young readers can quickly catch onto the characters, setting, and tone that will speak to elementary ages. They’ll get a quick introduction to Egyptian mythology, read about monsters doing funny things, imagine which monster they’d most like to have in their family, laugh a little bit and enjoy learning to love to read.

Theodora Hendrix and the Curious Case of the Cursed Beetle is the second book in the Theodora Hendrix series by Jordan Kopy, with illustrations by Chris Jevons, and is available from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division.

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