The publisher's own description of this book puts two sentences next to each other that marketing copy does not usually allow. Zoey is sure it will be a simple fix. Her first two tries fail.
Book two brings a forest monster called Gorp to the barn with an embarrassing problem, and the title tells you what the problem is. Gorp wants to go to the Monster Ball, so the clock in this one is a party. Zoey takes a look and knows exactly what to do.
Built like the rest of the series: early chapter book, short chapters, a picture on nearly every page, glossary at the back.
The science it actually teaches
The mistake in this book is made before anything is tried at all. Zoey looks at the problem and is certain. That is not carelessness and it is not a flaw in her, it is the ordinary way an obvious answer gets in front of a correct one. Being sure is precisely what stops a person checking. A guess you feel confident about is still a guess, and it does not stop being a guess because it has started to feel like knowledge. That idea is worth more to a seven year old than any number of posters about the steps of the scientific method.
Then the mold, which is real, and which is the best thing in this book to talk about at the table.
Mold is not dirt. It is a fungus, which means it is alive, which means it is doing something rather than sitting there looking bad. The spores that start it are in the air of your house right now and there is nothing whatsoever to be done about that. So what decides whether mold appears is not whether the spores arrive, because they always arrive. It is whether they land somewhere with the three things they need, which are damp, something to feed on, and warmth. That is the whole reason the bathroom grows it and the linen cupboard does not.
And here is the piece that keeps paying. Mold comes back. Take away what you can see, leave the conditions exactly as they were, and the same mold returns, because nothing about why it grew there has changed. A cleaning is not a cure. Anything that removes what you can see and leaves the conditions alone is a delay wearing the costume of a fix, and that is true of mold, of a leak, of a rash, and of a good many other things your child is about to spend a lifetime dealing with.
Which is why mold is such a good opponent for somebody who is certain. It looks like dirt. It looks like a wiping job. It is neither, and it will keep proving that for as long as it takes.
Zoey's handwritten notes are printed in the book, so the record of the tries that did not work is on the page as well. Your child sees a real log rather than a tidy one.
The child it lands with
The perfectionist. More than any other book in this series, this one is aimed straight at the perfectionist.
The child who will not start the drawing because it might come out wrong. The one who goes quiet and hard the moment they are corrected. That child is handed a hero who is confidently wrong in public, in front of a crying monster, and who keeps working anyway, and no adult in the book stops to explain the lesson. Fiction can do that. A talk from you at bedtime cannot.
For everybody else it is a straightforward five to eight year old couch read, and a monster with an embarrassing problem days before a big party does most of the work by itself.
One place to stop and talk
Go back to before anything has gone wrong, to the moment Zoey looks at Gorp and decides this will be easy. Read that bit twice. Then the question: how does she know?
She does not. Nobody has done anything yet. She has looked at something and had a feeling of recognition, and a feeling of recognition is the most convincing wrong answer there is.
Do this at the front of the book rather than after things have gone badly. Afterwards the point is obvious and your child gets it for free. Before, it costs something to notice, and the ones that cost something are the ones that stay.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book and the gentle part goes first. Nothing dies, nobody is hurt, and the crisis is a party and a smell. If you have a tender reader, the content is not the issue here.
The thing to know is that the emotional weather is heavier than in book one. There is a monster crying because he cannot go to the thing everybody else is going to, and there is a stretch in the middle where Zoey has nothing left to offer him. Plenty of children find that funny. A child who takes being wrong personally will feel it, and that is exactly why the book is good for them, and also why you want to be in the room for it rather than in the next one.
The grade band is the series band, 1 to 4, and it runs high at the top for a child reading alone. Treat it as 1 to 3 independent and a read-aloud from about five.
Where to get it
Buy this one with book one and read them close together, in order. Book one shows your child a problem solved by working at it. Book two shows the same child that being certain at the start is not the same as being right, which is the harder half and the half almost nobody teaches on purpose. Monsters and Mold is $5.99, the rest of the series sits on Stealth Science for when your child asks for the next one, and the pair comes to under thirteen dollars, which is less than one workbook that would teach the same idea worse.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Caterflies and Ice: The Book Where Zoey Gets It Wrong
Caterflies and Ice: Zoey and Sassafras #4 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Dragons and Marshmallows: The Science and the Catch
Dragons and Marshmallows: Zoey and Sassafras #1 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
A Beehive Is a City: The Magic School Bus Inside One
The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
