Verwandte Artikel zu Little Monsters

Little Monsters - Hardcover

Roche, Máire

 
9781665988643: Little Monsters
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1665988649 ISBN 13: 9781665988643
Verlag: Aladdin, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

For the first printing only! This hardcover features stenciled sprayed edges while the special edition supply lasts.

In this modern supernatural middle grade retelling of the beloved classic Little Women, the March sisters have a monstrous secret Meg will do anything to protect—especially with another beast lurking in the woods threatening to expose them.

Meg March and her three sisters are monsters. No, really. Meg has teeth that are a little too sharp. Jo gets furry under the full moon. Beth goes night flying on wings that are impossible to hide under her sweaters. And Amy? Well, don’t let her near a body of water or she’ll start sprouting her mermaid’s tail.

Meg is sure their foster mom, Marmee, wouldn’t like any of this if she knew. And Jo’s best friend Laurie, the nice boy next door, would run screaming. To make matters worse, Meg’s small town outside of Salem is on edge. A vicious beast has been spotted in the forest, and Farmer Bhaer believes it’s responsible for his missing chickens. Meg is sure to be blamed if anyone realizes she’s a monster in disguise. And the closer it gets to Halloween, the surer the town is that something evil is hiding in the forest.

Meg doesn’t always remember what she gets up to at night, and sometimes, she wakes alone in a mossy part of the forest and has to find her way back. With John Brooke determined to find out just what Meg is hiding and locals working to uncover the monsters in their midst, Meg must find the culprit herself—or risk losing the little home she’s found with her sisters.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Máire Roche is a former elementary and pre-k teacher who now writes stories full of magic, mystery, and wonder. When she isn’t teaching or imagining fictional worlds, Máire enjoys running, teaching martial arts, and baking too many cookies. She lives in the Midwest with her spouse and their very disagreeable cat, Lulu.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1 1.
“Halloween won’t be Halloween without any costumes,” Jo grumbled, kicking off her tattered boots as she entered Meg’s bedroom, then flopped on the floor next to Meg’s bed.

Meg sighed and looked down at her little sister and then at her own sweatshirt. The seams were unraveling near the wrists on both sleeves, because Meg always picked at them when she was nervous. And in her life? That tended to happen a lot.

“It’s not fair.” Amy, the youngest of the March sisters, walked in behind Jo, trailing her feet dramatically. “All the other kids are dressing up as something new and cool.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” Meg said impatiently. “But it’s not like we have anybody who can buy us a costume. Besides, I wasn’t going this year anyway. I’m a little too old.”

She was about to turn fourteen, and though some of her friends were definitely still going, Meg was different. For one thing, she lived in foster care with her younger sisters, so she had more grown-up worries overall. For another, she was… well, maybe a monster.

“We’ve got each other.” Beth poked her head into Meg’s room.

And now they were all in Meg’s room, because of course they were.

Meg stopped the eye roll. She didn’t want to hurt her little sister’s feelings, but it was just… such a small space. And they all always needed something from Meg. Other kids her age didn’t have a house full of little sisters who needed them. They got to play with their sisters, or argue with them, or borrow their sweaters, or—Meg wasn’t really sure what else. She bit down all those feelings and said:

“I was going to buy some costumes.” Meg pushed back her desk chair and stood. “But can we maybe talk about this somewhere that isn’t my room?”

“Since when did you get so grumpy?” Jo asked. Her tone was grumpier than Meg had ever heard. “We were just talking. Geez.”

That familiar ache pressed at Meg’s ribs. She caught her breath. Big breath in, big breath out. No need to yell at her little sisters. They needed her, and it was her job to be the big sister and take care of everybody. Right?

“Okay,” she said. “Is Marmee home?”

Marmee, their foster mom, worked two jobs: one was part-time at a gas station, and one was long shifts at a local forest preserve just outside Salem. And though Marmee always made sure the girls had meals and were on the bus before she left, Meg knew well enough that if Marmee was gone, Meg was the one everyone would come to with a question or a problem.

“Marmee is making dinner,” Beth told her as she sat down near the door. At eleven, Beth was still small for her age, though she looked even smaller in Meg’s old sweater. Beth had hooked her thumbs through the holes that Meg had worn into the sleeves near the wrists and was rocking her body slightly as she always did when she was sitting. Each of the girls had a different type of monstrous magic, and Beth’s involved… well, bat wings. So she wore a lot of oversized sweaters. “Buttered noodles for me. Mac and cheese for all of you.”

“We could just ask Marmee for Halloween costumes,” Amy said eagerly. Amy was a year younger than Beth, but just as tall. As long as Amy didn’t go near salt water, her body looked like any normal ten-year-old girl’s, so she was more confident and way, way less worried than Meg.

“No,” Meg said quickly, shooing the girls gently toward the door. “We don’t want to bother Marmee.”

They’d had more sets of foster parents than Meg even remembered, ever since Meg had been about four years old, and every single time the girls became too much work, they sent them away again. Worse, some even talked about splitting the girls up. Four girls were just a lot to take care of, after all.

Meg had always known, for as long as she could remember, that it was her job to make it all easier for grown-ups, or the grown-ups could make things really hard for Meg and her siblings.

“I don’t think Marmee would care,” Amy huffed. “She already said—”

“I’ll take care of the costumes,” Meg assured them again, twisting her long brown hair around one finger. Her hair was the darkest of all her sisters, though all of them had the same fair skin and freckles. “I have the money.”

That part wasn’t quite true, but it felt like truth had to be a little stretchy to keep everybody happy and okay and together.

Jo didn’t look convinced. “If you’re sure,” she said.

“Say, Meg, do you think it’s even safe to go trick-or-treating this year?” Beth asked. Her eyes darted nervously toward the window, as if she had seen something outside that worried her.

“What do you mean?” Meg asked. She was already on her phone, calculating how much money she’d need to make to get everybody the right Halloween costume. “Of course it’s safe.”

“There was something in the woods again last night,” Beth said timidly. “I heard it, growling and crunching around and—”

Amy grabbed Beth’s hand. “Come on, Beth,” she said. “They’re not listening to us anyway.”

Meg waved at them with one hand as she finished doing the math on her phone.

When their two younger sisters had gone, Jo settled her hands on her hips. Jo was twelve, a year younger than Meg, and sometimes—when Meg failed at keeping everybody happy together—Jo had to step in and do Meg’s job.

Maybe that was why Jo often looked at Meg with that spark of anger in her eyes.

Meg sighed. “Do you want to be Edgar Allan Poe again?”

Jo had gone as the old poet the last three Halloweens, and once she had even convinced her whole class to call her Poe instead of Jo all school year.

“Yeah,” Jo said. “But that’s not why I stayed.”

Meg sighed again.

“You don’t have the money.” Jo leaned against the door frame. “I know you don’t.”

Meg worried her lip with her teeth, and then stopped, quickly. She had normal teeth on most days. But sometimes, when she was upset, her other teeth would descend. She couldn’t explain it, but it had started happening a few years ago—around the same time her sisters all showed their monstrous magical abilities—and she definitely couldn’t control it.

When the teeth slid down, she looked like a real monster. So she kept her mouth closed tight, even if the teeth hurt her upper lip a little, and smiled as little as she could. It wasn’t safe to bite her lip either, in case her sharp incisors descended unexpectedly.

“I will have the money,” she told Jo. “I already got a job next door helping take care of Laurie’s chickens.” It was a good thing, too, because Meg had totaled everything up four times on her calculator app, just to be sure, and the cost wasn’t looking good.

Jo’s brow scrunched on her forehead. “You’re only thirteen,” she said. “That’s too young to have a job.”

It definitely wasn’t. Meg would know, because she’d been working odd jobs since she was nine. Who else was going to make sure Amy got the new colored pencils she wanted? Who else was going to get Jo a pair of winter mittens...

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Verlag
Aladdin
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1665988649
ISBN 13 
9781665988643
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

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Bad Hersfeld
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