"The Witch Boy" by Molly Knox Ostertag

I picked this one up because it's by the same person who wrote D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call. It's not as good as that one, unfortunately. I feel like the Five Worlds guys could have done a better job of roughly the same storyline, but I am rather biased towards them.

So anyway! The thing is about a magic family where all of the girls can do magic and all of the boys can turn into animals. Except then one of the boys (here comes our main character) turns out to be crap at turning into animals, but he's fairly decent at magic (even though everyone keeps telling him he's playing with fire and refusing to teach him anything, which means his primary method of learning magic is just to ditch turning-into-animals practice and eavesdrop on his sisters' magic lessons).

Once we've got all that out of the way, the plot starts. During Try To Turn Into Animals: The Field Trip, a wild creepy monster appeared! It promptly kidnaps one of the main character's brothers, then vanishes again. Naturally, everyone panics. 

Also, there's stuff with the main character making friends with a normal, non-magical girl, who ends up helping in the final bossfight by |smacking the creepy(ish) monster in the face with a baseball bat|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for some scary imagery and people bleeding fairly badly after getting attacked. This book could make an interesting videogame in the right hands.

[EDIT: T15+, due to (again) {T15+ a character casually mentioning homosexuality as if it's just a normal thing.}. I'd hoped that was a one-time thing with the other book, but apparently not. Sorry, Ostertag, I'll be avoiding you from here on out.

I was going to rate this 2 stars simply for rubbing me wrong, but then I noticed the thing in the content warning tag above, so the rating got shunted down to 1 star.

(Endnote: The art in the kidnapping/abduction scene is pretty appropriately creepy, although when the monster actually fully appears it just kinda builds a bridge across the uncanny valley and stands in the middle of it. It looked a bit silly, is what I'm trying to say.)