The Chicken-Coop Monster by Patricia C. McCissak is the story of nine-year old Missy who must face and ultimately conquer her inner “monster.”  When Missy’s parents decide to divorce, they send her to Tennessee to live with her grandparents for the summer.  Missy is not happy about this because no one has asked her about how she feels, and she notes that no one seems to care much about her opinions anymore.  Worse than that, Missy is certain that a monster inhabits her grandmother’s chicken-coop—Missy should know, too, because she is the president of the St. Louis chapter of  Monster Watchers of America.  So convinced is Missy of the monster’s existence, she actually feels its ominous presence.  When her grandmother tells her to latch the coop, Missy refuses.  When her grandmother asks her to come see the chickens as they set on their eggs, Missy refuses.  When told to stop her silliness about the coop, Missy refuses.  Nothing can get her to believe there is no monster, and so strong is her hysteria that she even convinces a local girl, Mae Lizabeth, to believe that she herself has been attacked by the monster (when indeed Mae Lizabeth only scratched herself on a nail in the chicken coop).  That is the final straw for both of Missy’s grandparents, and her grandfather takes a long walk with her.  Missy tells her grandfather all about the monster, and how she cannot let her guard down or the monster will take over.  That is when her grandfather (Daddy James) confides that he too was once haunted by a monster that lived in the crawlspace under his house.  He goes on to explain that he conquered the monster by standing up and facing it, and he knows that because Missy is his granddaughter she is capable of defeating her monster, too.  That is what she does, and suddenly, the monster is powerless over her.  I believe the story’s message is that all of us have “monsters,” but we cannot let them rule over us.  Like Missy and her grandfather, we must face them.