HILDA AND THE MAD SCIENTIST

Neat delivery of an alternative take on presumptuousness. Hilda, a well-meaning but meddling do-gooder, troops up Vampire Hill to visit her special brand of helpfulness upon the evil Dr. Weinerstein, suffering from a bout of rheumatism. The doctor can't abide Hilda's tidying and caregiving (``I go where I'm needed and stay until I'm not,'' is her chant), so he decides to build a monster to scare her off. Hilda unwittingly gets the drop on the doctorand the last laugh as well. The monster is a carbon copy of Hilda, and not since Edward Miller's The Curse of Claudia (1989) has a monster mansion been so deposed. Adam brings a nice, light-handed style to her point: humanitarians may be generous old souls, but have their downsides as well. Thiesing's illustrations hum with activity and provide lots of incidental items to readers busy on the page. If Hilda's clone resembles the bride of Frankenstein, it provides an edgy underscore to the ambiguous gift. A quietly canny tale cloaked in jester's garb. (Picture book. 4-8)