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BoingBoing: Even Monsters Need Haircuts

Matthew McElligott’s Even Monsters Need Haircuts is a cute picture book about a boy who sneaks into his father’s barbershop every full moon and gives haircuts to all the neighborhood monsters. It’s full of sight gags — barbering a gorgon while wearing a blindfold; cutting Frankenstein’s monster’s hair with a clipper that’s plugged into one of his neck bolts — and complex pictures filled with tons of interesting monsters with extra limbs, eyes, heads, etc, to talk about with your kids.

I brought a copy along on the summer family holiday and it quickly became the favorite of my two-and-a-half year old daughter and three-and-a-half year old nephew, who demanded to hear it read until they’d memorized it. The grownups in the cottage liked the scene where the monsters all help the boy clean up the barbershop at the end of the night, and we made reference to it every time we tried to get the kids to clean up their toys (it worked pretty well!).–Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net