With a palette straight from the endpapers of Where the Wild Things Are, and postures not a little reminiscent of Max, Willems crafts a sweetly original morality play about a very unscary monster. Realizing that he doesn’t possess the ideal monster attributes (1,642 teeth, enormous size or utter weirdness), Leonardo resolves to find “the most scaredy-cat kid in the whole world . . . and scare the tuna salad out of him!” Exhaustive research yields Sam, who, in a double-page-spread torrent of words, explains why he’s so miserable he cries when Leonardo tries to scare him: “MY MEAN BIG BROTHER STOLE MY ACTION FIGURE [etc.]!” The instant connection between the two is the very definition of sympathy, and Leonardo and Sam proceed to become fast friends. The highly predictable ending is made fresh by the superb control of pacing, just-zany-enough sense of humor and body language readers have come to expect from the creator of Pigeon and Knufflebunny. Leonardo and Sam appear mostly in the corners of vast blank spreads, the showbiz typeface (all caps) emphasizing the theatricality of it all. Bravo! (Picture book. 3-6)
