Grant’s use of a quite ordinary young woman as a protagonist adds to the fun, making the scares work better even though they are done just as broadly as the humor is. She also manages to combine that humor with real scares, devious villains, and a nearly hopeless situation. Grant has created a marvelous farce of a book that is filled with broad humor. An escape plan begins to brew when she meets the frightening gardener and his brother, but can they get past the electrified fence and the guard poodles? Slowly though Anastasia starts to put together the mystery of her great aunties and what is actually going on in the creepy asylum. She is forced to clean the asylum and at night she is locked into her room. She is fed only Mystery Lumps and no dinner. Agony’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane. But then at school that morning everything changed when she is kidnapped by two old women calling themselves her “great aunties.” She finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house that was once St.

There was simply nothing special about her at all. Other than that unusual start to the day which ended with her mother bellowing for waffles from her bedroom, Anastasia was an entirely average girl. The League of Beastly Dreadfuls by Holly GrantĪnastasia started her day by attending a funeral alongside her father, a funeral at the compost pile for her father’s dead venus flytrap.

The league of beastly dreadfuls