This book absolutely haunted me up until a few years ago. Once on a family visit to Nantucket when I was a girl, I spotted this book in a bookstore and had been enchanted by it. I only read it once, and we didn't buy it, and I never saw it again, but the story stayed with me. More than ten years ago now, I Dogpiled (ha! remember those days before Google!?!) the words swamp/little girl/swamp monster/book and was reunited with the pictures that had so long ago influenced me.
It was funny, too, that it would be by Mercer Mayer since I probably had every "Little Critter" book known to man at the time.
Yeller belly cottonmouth,
Possum up a tree,
You can catch the swamp fever
But you can't catch me.
I suppose being from the south and actually living nearby to real swamps made this book come alive all the more... the evil ghost of a Confederate soldier, the swamp witch, cotton mouths, and how the brilliant little girl outsmarts them all. She even sticks it to the devil himself!
I guess since I had my own swamp monsters of the imagination, it was gratifying to see a female kicking butt on the creepy crawlies of the dark. I have to give this book 80 thumbs up... plus my son gets a huge kick out of it which is all the more awesome.
Also by:
Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp
One Monster After Another
Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-A-Zoo
Me and My Flying Machine
Beauty and the Beast
A Special Trick
Bubble Bubble
OOPS
One Frog Too Many
How the Trollusk Got His Hat
Little Monster at Work
AH-CHOO
The Bird of Time
Herbert the Timid Dragon
Professor Wormbog's Gloomy Kerploppus
Boy, Was I Mad
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Reference: theartofastralprojection.blogspot.com
