Publishers Weekly
08/17/2020
This slight tale subverts expectations by revealing monsters’ true fear: babies. As an older brunette child reads a bedtime story to their younger, balder sibling, they hear noises coming from within the dark closet—though the duo seems oblivious to the monstrous existence of glowing-eyed entities tucked around the room and beneath the bed. Flipping on the lights, the older kid soon discovers that the baby terrifies the multicolored, big-eyed creatures hidden in the closet. Spreads of the infant crying, needing to be changed, teething, and otherwise demonstrating baby behavior teaches the narrator: “It’s no wonder why.../ Babies make monsters want to cry!” A loose rhyme scheme accompanies unoutlined but expressive digital illustrations. While the brief narrative feels slightly underdeveloped, the conceit is likely to entertain new older siblings with a fondness for the monstrous. Ages 4–6. (Self-published)
Kirkus Reviews
2019-12-16
A little boy learns he has nothing to fear from monsters as long as his baby sister is around.
“Everybody knows” that “monsters are afraid of babies!” In this sweet, wacky picture book, motley, frightful monsters become scared when confronted by a boy’s baby sister. As her brother looks on, the googly-eyed, lumpy, toothy, horned beasts of various sizes, shapes, and colors observe his little sister with alarm as she toddles through the house making messes, causing chaos, and bringing the monsters to tears by outdoing their “sticky and icky” and “loud and stinky” ways. Using comedy to calm children’s nighttime fears of monsters in the closet or under the bed and to help them see their maddening, drooling little sibling in a new light, the work is one of a series of three books launching a new publishing imprint by writer, director, and musician Tana (The Kitten, the Cat & the Apple, 2019, etc.). The loosely rhyming text is large and well spaced, and young readers and lapsitters will enjoy repeating the funny sound effects peppered throughout the story (“ERGG…DROOOOO…GUBB”). The team of Abbott and Leutwyler (King of Glee, 2019), which pictures the boy and his sister with beige-ish skin and dark brown eyes and hair—in the baby’s case, just one little curl spiraling up from the top of her head—has great fun with the witty depictions of the sadly intimidated monsters.
A reassuring message wrapped in rib-tickling humor.
