Nighttime Ninja

PreS-Gr 1–It’s midnight and a ninja is sneaking through a silent house. He’s creeping closer and closer to his target until suddenly, “the lights flash on!” In an unexpectedly humorous twist, the ninja turns out to be a little boy caught by his mother in his attempt to raid the kitchen. She confiscates his midnight snack and sends her little ninja back to bed. Young’s austere, nearly abstract mixed-media collage illustrations are mostly black silhouettes of the ninja in various action poses, set against paper and fabric backgrounds. They perfectly complement DaCosta’s spare but neatly suspenseful story. Pair this one with J. C. Phillipps’s Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Be Noticed (Viking, 2009) and David Bruins’s The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear (Kids Can, 2009) for a fun ninja-themed storytime.–Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova, formerly at Chappaqua Library, NY