PETER'S ANGEL: A Story About Monsters

by Hope Campbell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 1976

The horde of comic book monsters who share Peter's room and take up most of his spare time so that they finally begin to get the upper hand have a lot more muscle than the animated museum pieces in Baum's It Looks Alive to Me! (p. 403, J-137). And the angel Peter builds to exorcise them grows convincingly from a makeshift coat hanger and barrel-stave dummy to a grand gold-papered, balloon-brained totem. When launched from his rooftop during a thunder storm, the angel does its job grandly, pulling Peter's monsters after him into the city sky. We (and we suspect, kids who share Peter's addiction to pop horrors will feel the same way) are less taken with the sympathetic mice, Enid and Eliza Starbuck, who leave their home behind the wall in Peter's room to invoke the power of the archangel Michael, and who expire at the foot of his statue on the very same night as Peter's angel takes wing. Mystical Yankee mice may be a bit more whimsy than this paper-thin story can take, but Campbell is on the right track in attempting to bring literary fantasy home to the imaginative life of the contemporary American child. An auspicious launching, even if Peter's Angel doesn't soar so much as catch a lucky updraft.

Pub Date: April 12, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 152

Publisher: Four Winds

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION