GOODNIGHT UNICORN

A celebration of unicorns falls squarely under the heading of "camp" in this latest takeoff on Margaret Wise Brown’s best known work.

Rather than a great green room, readers are taken to a “great green wood” where they meet its magical forest denizens. One by one, readers meet then bid goodnight to gnomes, fairies, dragons, and more until they see that all these things are just products of the imagination of a unicorn-loving child falling asleep in a very familiar-looking great green room. Backmatter consists of “facts” about unicorns. As for the writing, it’s unimaginative (a fact that is partly the fault of the format) and occasionally nonsensical: “Goodnight purple. Goodnight pink. / Goodnight colts and bashful wink.” Spanjer excels at rendering a horse's form, but readers must wade through a fair number of eyelashes, rainbows, and prancing to appreciate it. There’s a thick layer of sugary frosting to the proceedings. Parents seeking horned pony fare would do better to indulge in Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Brigitte Barrager’s Uni the Unicorn (2014) or Dallas Clayton’s Lily the Unicorn (2014).

For unicorn die-hards only—and they’ll have to brush their teeth after.