Review: 'The Creakers' by Tom Fletcher

When the monsters under the bed come out creakin'.... And the grown-ups all disappear.... It might not be the kids but the monsters who need to watch out!

What would happen in a world without grownups? Would you go to school? TP a tree? Drive your parents car? Or eat your way through a vending machine? The children of Whiffington Town get up to all sorts of mischief when they wake up and find all the grown-ups have disappeared. They aren't at their homes, they aren't on the TV, they aren't even at the school! Where could all the grownups have gone? This is a fun read - with some excellent illustrations - of a normal town that's is changed forever when the grownups disappear! Lucy Dungston finds herself unofficially in charge as she tries to bring order to the chaos and solve the mystery of the missing adults!

She soon realises that her dreams of monsters under the bed are more than just dreams, and with the help of her two friends Ella and Norman, sets about capturing the creatures and discovering the underground, upside down, topsy turvy world of the creakers ... Down there the King rules, gathering garbage from the town above and creating a huge rotten world for the rotten creakers. And, amongst the rubbish, there is another world, of marshmallows and rainbows and amusement parks, where the serious grownups have rediscovered their youth and sillyness and forgotten their life, and families, in Whiffington Town.

Lucy must use all her guile to figure out how to rescue the grown-ups, and escape the dark and smelly world of the creakers. Will they all make it out? What will happen to the creaked world? Can the two worlds live in harmony? Fletcher creates a really exciting world underground, with great descriptions of the creakers underground garbage-filled world. I found the book slow at first, but it soon changed into an exciting adventure as Lucy disappeared underground and sussed-out how to get by in the rotten creakers world.

The book is easy-to-read, with fun chapters and exciting fonts (and I enjoy the lesson in how one man's garbage can be another mans treasure), but I wasn't keen on the way the narrator talks to the character and the reader throughout the book - I found it interrupted the flow of the story.

Synopsis: Are you ready for an adventure? You are? Good. Imagine if one day you woke up and all the grownups had vanished. That's what happens to Lucy Dungston. She's the hero of this story (but she doesn't know it yet). While the rest of the children in Lucy's Town are running wild, she's coming up with a plan to find out what's going on. Then, late one night, Lucy spots for mysterious creatures creeping around her bedroom: GRUNT, GUFF, SCRATCH and SNIFF. They are THE CREAKERS and they know exactly what's going on!