Storybook Favorites: Mermaids, Hawai’i, and Group Therapy for “Monsters”

I was looking for three things while going through these storybooks: humor, creativity, and something unexpected. And I found three that did just that.

The first storybook to catch my attention MermaidsOnly.com is hilarious! The title grabbed my attention and immediately that “Farmers Only” song popped into my head. I liked the pictures that were used and the bios were pretty funny; they’re also typical bios would you see on a dating website. Also, the fact that one of the mermaids had a pet Great White is pretty fun to imagine. The introduction to the site did a good job of letting me know what I was looking at (even though the title already did) and was an entertaining read. The overall design of the site was really good – the formatting made it clear and easy to read.

The second storybook that caught my attention was The Dirt on Hawaii’s Elite – the Gossip Girl-esque theme was brilliant. I’ve never watched Gossip Girl or followed it, but this was still a very entertaining storybook. It was able to transcend the Gossip Girl influence so that it was still funny for someone like myself, someone who has only ever been peripherally aware of the show. The colors were beautiful and the writing was particularly good.

The third storybook is my favorite: Legendary Creatures Speak Up, A Human Encounters Convention. This is just amazing. I love the turning of the tables here – in the picture below, I highlighted my favorite bits from the introduction page.

Except from Legendary Creatures Speak Up.

Dr. Erik Yeti holding a group therapy session for his fellow legendary creatures was amazing – Courtney Kraken struggling with loneliness and Cornelius Dragon struggling with his guilt of not having saved his human friend in time. The transcriptions of the panels on each page are wonderfully done and the writing is clear and concise.