THE BIG MONSTER SNOREY BOOK

Large monsters are hungry for little monsters when they wake from their snoozes…but one little monster has a clever plan to scare them off.

Big, winding ribbons of ZZZZZZZs and alliterative foolery take center stage here as, armed with a microphone and recording device, a diminutive green fuzzball creeps past a series of much larger sleeping monsters. “First is Norris. He has a monster cold. While he sleeps, his tiny toothypegs chitter and chatter and his knobbly knees knock.” Other nappers “jibber-jabber,” “tippy-tap” with “terribly tatty toenails,” or issue alimentary “gurgles and growls” as they saw away. And so, when the sleepers at last wake and cast about for a snack, it’s their own noises, fed back at HIGH VOLUME, that put them to flight and allow the tiny trickster to bed down peacefully in a comfy shoe. Depicted in scribbles and scrabbles and appropriately loud colors, Hodgkinson’s collage monsters look like huge, comical cousins to Ed Emberley’s Big Green anxiety-banisher.

Another way to banish imagination’s monsters, as well as being great fun to read, alone or aloud—with, of course, exaggerated sound effects.