The Daily Comet: Boy Saves Earth from Giant Octopus!: 04/18/12

My son and I were both drawn to The Daily Comet: Boy Saves Earth from Giant Octopus! by Frank and Devin Asch. It's somewhere between a comic book and tabloid magazine cover.

Hayward Palmer, skeptic and self proclaimed know-it-all goes with his dad to work. To his immense embarrassment, Dad is a tabloid reporter. The book chronicles Hayward's day and how he ends up learning that the Daily Comet is publishing the truth and how he manages to save the world from an alien invasion.

Sean and I are fans of monster, alien, ghost stories. We also really enjoyed the Asch's Mr. Maxwell's Mouse (link to review) but The Daily Comet didn't pull us in the same way.

Part of the problem is Hayward's attitude. He's such an annoying know-it-all that he doesn't make a very sympathetic protagonist. Another problem we had was with the helter-skelter approach to each page. The illustrations are meant to look like pages from the Daily Comet tabloid but they end up getting in the way of the story.

Three stars.

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