Review by Booklist Review
With the sun rising, these little ones will do anything to stay up just one more minute. Daddy Vampire is forced to fetch them one more snack, Mommy Mummy is cajoled to give one more cuddle, and so on. But these parents are tired, frustrated, and ready for bed. Quinn's clever rhymes (I'll always love you, to the grave. / But frankly, dear, it's sleep I crave) are paired with dark-toned illustrations of cute little monsters looking mostly sleepy. It all ends up comfortably well, with all the little creatures snoozing. Good for reading to a classroom or one-on-one, this delightfully ghoulish tale shows that even monster parents have it tough when putting little creatures to bed.--Rosie Camargo Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this bedtime tour of a spooky alternate universe, Quinn (the Not for Children Children's Books series) and Spires (the Binky the Space Cat series) show that monster and fiend parents face the same challenges getting their offspring to sleep as their human counterparts. As dawn threatens to break across the sky, a tired-eyed ghost parent tries to coax its baby, cuddled against a tombstone, to get some shut-eye ("I'll always love you, to the grave./ But frankly, dear, it's sleep I crave."), while a lagoon-dweller holds a swaddled, beatific baby and sings a bubbly lullaby ("blupblupblooop"). Despite their shared need for sleep, the grown-up mummy, zombies, and vampire, among others, understand that baby ghouls have bedtime fears (in their case, the "horrid things" are bunnies, unicorns, and fluffy kittens), just as they believe that having a "tiny terror" to love is beyond compare. "So good night, moon. Farewell, night./ Guard me and mine throughout the light." Ages 2-5. Author's agent: Bernadette Baker-Baughman, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. Illustrator's agent: Claire Easton, Painted Words. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Horn Book Review
In this creature-feature bedtime story, a series of monster families prepares for sleep. The tale's humor comes from its pairing of treacly night-night rhymes--"A little wonder, yes, that's true. / A miracle, uniquely you"--with warm cartoony pictures showing mummies, dragons, werewolves, vampires ("We've had a wild and woolly night. / Now give Daddy one more bite"), and more. (c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A bedtime book for all the nocturnal ghouls, ghosts, and goblins.Structured identically to the many twee books about bedtime for human children, this is designed to do the same job: get little ones to sleep. Just as human children want one more cuddle, snack, and book, so too do these monsters' offspring. Godzilla's diapered child wants to keep stomping block cities, and it's a struggle to get the bigfoot child's toes scrubbed, face brushed, and pajamas on. Then there are those pesky fears that parents need to banish (imagined terrors include a unicorn and a cute kitten). The beauty of Quinn's text, though (the vampire dad's request for one more bite and a couple of bobbled rhymes excepted), is that this will work on human children as well. Indeed, some of the typical twee has made it to these pages, demonstrating that monster caregivers are just as sentimental as human ones: "A little wonder, yes, that's true. / A miracle, uniquely you." Spires' illustrations mix the tender with the slightly macabre (the zombie child's stuffed animal is missing its lower half), and the palette is dark and subdued to match the time before the dawn. Two messages come through loud and clear: caregivers' love for their children and, in the words of the ghost parent: "I'll always love you, to the grave. / But frankly, dear, it's sleep I crave." Truer words were never spoken. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
