LIGHTS-OUT, LEONARD

A boy sees monsters at night.

Whenever his mom or dad says “Lights-out, Leonard,” Leonard—a White boy in a fox suit—cries “NO!” and wins five more minutes. The extra time doesn’t help banish the lurking monsters, nor does persuading his tired parents to leave his lights on overnight for a week. Even in a well-lit room, Leonard sees creatures that have many extra features and limbs: “five-nosed, seven-tailed, eleven-handed, scaly-waily.” Then someone places an instruction book on Leonard’s bed. Ways to frighten monsters include “Minty breath—this makes monsters feel so sick they shrivel up and disintegrate into a pile of dust” (clever parents!); stuffed animals, which eject monsters “straight through the ceiling and onto the moon”; and gentle music, which makes monsters “go flat like pancakes, and their ears dry up like old playdough.” Nixon’s art features sharp angles, inky purple-blues against low-contrast oranges, and so many discordant patterns that although the visual chaos makes symbolic sense, the spreads are too busy, with no particular place for readers’ eyes to focus. The multipatterned monsters are so abstract that they require effort to see. For deeper and more cohesive monster-conquering, go old-school with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are or get Emily Tetri’s brilliant Tiger vs. Nightmare (2018).

Too visually busy and abstract to help with readers’ own monster woes.