![]() Karen suspects that Anka’s history is the key to her death, whether suicide or murder. ![]() Ferris interlaces Karen’s story with Anka’s, through the narrative device of having Karen listen to cassette tapes on which Anka had recorded an interview. Early in the book, Karen’s neighbor Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, suffers a violent death that is ruled a suicide by police. The economic and cultural changes of that era, as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., influence Karen’s story. Karen lives on the north side of Chicago in the spring of 1968. ![]() Being a monster also allows Karen to hide in plain sight from other children and their casual cruelty. ![]() as Karen calls them: those who are Mean, Ordinary, and Boring. She’s a girl who needs fangs and claws, to protect herself not from an angry mob of villagers but instead from another mob-or M.O.B. Ferris’s drawings show Karen as Karen sees herself: a preteen werewolf, on the verge of transforming. In Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, 10-year-old Karen Reyes believes she is a monster-she obsesses over horror comics and creature features on late-night TV. ![]() What is a monster? The word “monster” comes from the same Latin root as the word “demonstrate” there is something demonstrative or showy about a monster that reveals to us what we might not want to see. ![]()
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