A great book for teaching young children that monsters aren’t real, it tells of a young boy walking alone through a forest where people say there lives a terrible monster.  He acknowledges the existence of bears and wolves and snakes in the forest, but he’s not afraid of them because he knows they aren’t really interested in attacking him.  Much of the story consists of the boy’ dialogue with the monster who is following him, trying to convince him he should be scared, but the boy keeps walking calmly along, insisting he doesn’t believe in the monster.  Eventually, as the monster fails to convince the boy to believe in him, he grows smaller, until he starts to look like a kitten, as he begs the boy to believe in him just a little bit.  In the end the boy picks up the kitten, agrees that maybe he could believe in him just a little bit, and asks his mom if he can keep the kitten he found in the forest.  The writing in the story is good: it’s got good voice and fluency, and it does a great job using text features such as larger, bolder print to help it be read aloud with expression.  The trouble is with the illustrations, which I found rather off-putting.  I think if I were to use it with a group of students, I would choose not to show them the illustrations and ask them to use their own imagination to create mind pictures that go with the words — maybe even have them draw their own illustrations.