IT’S BEDTIME, CUCUY/¡A LA CAMA, CUCUY!

Another bedtime battle is won in this bilingual text featuring the Latin-American bogeyman and his mother, both rendered here as decidedly cute and unfrightening elfin creatures with blue skin and spiky blue hair. Cucuy, the little monster, refuses to go to bed, behaving monstrously with screams and kicks, ugly faces, wiggles and jiggles and every sort of tantrum until mother declares “enough fuss.” The now red-faced Cucuy finally agrees to count sheep and “get just a tiny bit of sleep.” Coombs’s deep, richly colored paintings bring out a typical child’s surroundings (filled with a spirited assortment of monster dolls) and reflect his extreme remonstrations. The loosely rhyming English text is all-too-often forced (“Even in all that craze Mamá is able to put him in his pj’s”); it appears above a serviceable Spanish translation. When bedtime becomes a hideous affair, the outrageously grotesque behavior of one may spark a bit of realistic appreciation for many. (Picture book. 3-5)