Ruffleclaw
Human homes smell wonderfully of soap. Besides, their food tastes so much better than woodlice. Ruffle claw is fed up with his smelly monster life. So one night he crawls into Tommy’s warm, pillowy bed.
Ruffleclaw is a furry red monster who lives in a burrow under a toolshed. When he decides to move in with a family of humans, he climbs right into bed with a boy named Tommy. Tommy wants to keep Ruffleclaw as a pet, but it won’t be easy. Ruffleclaw makes huge messes—he spits, he drinks shampoo, and he eats everything in the fridge . . . along with the plates! Can Tommy teach his monster to behave?
- First published 2015
- Reading age Age 7
- Illustrated by Vivienne To and Cornelia Funke
- Publisher Penguin Random House
- Available at IndieBound.org
- Also available as Audio Book
Ruffle claw’s burrow lay well hidden under an old toolshed, right next to Shaggystink’s and Wormtooth’s burrows. For its main entrance, Ruffleclaw had loosened three floorboards inside the shed. Outside, carefully hidden among high stinging nettles, was the emergency exit, because Ruffleclaw was an earth monster, and earth monsters were cautious creatures.
Like any other earth monster’s burrow, Ruffleclaw’s home smelled of earthworms and millipedes, but the floor was covered with soft sweaters, and piled high in the corners were all the human things he had snuck away with over time.
Ruffleclaw’s neighbors, Shaggystink and Wormtooth, came to visit him only very rarely. "Yuckity-icky-yuck!" Shaggystink moaned every time he poked his head into Ruffleclaw’s burrow, always holding his big nose with at least two of his four paws. "What a horrible stench!"Wormtooth would just mutter something about human filth and quickly return to her own burrow, which was filled with the delicious scent of hundreds of woodlice.
Ruffle claw didn’t care at all what those two thought. Let them munch their bugs and scratch their fleabites. Let them wallow in the mud and slurp slippery slugs. All of that was just not enough for him. Oh no.
While the other monsters spent their nights digging for hideous treats in the humans’ trash cans, Ruffleclaw padded right up to the human house on his furry paws.