SMALL BLUE AND THE DEEP DARK NIGHT

Small Blue (a little bunny) gets a bad case of the middle-of-the-night willies, imagining what spooky creatures might lurk in the dark corners of her home.

“Big Brown, Big Brown!” she wails, in a shrill pitch familiar to all parents. Small Blue’s caregiver, a lumpy, burly bear, offers reassuringly ridiculous counterarguments to assuage the bunny’s fears. Big Brown wonders whether those “[g]remlins and goblins, with empty, rumbling bellies,” weren’t there at all, and instead there was ”a delightful doggies’ Saturday-night unicycle convention” underway. It is dark, after all. Who can tell? Children will get the hang of Big Brown’s loopy logic quickly. The dark could harbor “giant hairy spiders and flappy bats” or, just as likely, host “a smiley spacemen’s zero-gravity birthday party.” Jittery readers come to see it’s probably neither; the dark is just that, dark, and nothing more. Big Brown’s enveloping brawn and fantastically implausible nighttime scenarios turn quivering fears into giggles. Mildly cartoonish artwork, in purply-blues (lights off) and cozy yellows (lights on), offers thick linework and lots of rounded edges, eyes, noses and mouths, softening Blue’s scary fantasies and rendering Brown’s imaginings all the more comical. 

Add this original, illuminating book to any stack of in-the-dark, nighty-night anxiety tales right next to the bed, alongside that last glass of water—but leave the door open a crack! (Picture book. 2-6)