Lights Out! - Hardcover

Kindergarten-Grade 3?Poor Counselor Jim. He's got six Badger Scouts who just can't settle down and go to sleep. Every time he turns off the cabin lights, one of the boys shouts at him to turn them back on. Each child harbors a different fear?from a lion lurking outside to a monster under the floor to an eyeball on the ceiling to a ravenous mosquito in the room to vampires surrounding the outhouse. Jim's rational explanations don't do much to calm the campers. Predictably enough, after the tolerant young man loses his patience, the children nestle into their sleeping bags with smiles on their faces, and he returns to his own cabin only to be hounded by their demons. The full-color cartoon illustrations are more humorous than frightening?oddly enough, the wordless picture showing Jim cowering in bed is the scariest one. While there is some humor in both text and art, and though young readers can certainly identify with the situation, the book on the whole isn't that creepy or that funny?in fact, it's a bit tedious.?Vanessa Elder, School Library Journal
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kids who suspect that scary creatures lurk in the night will find kindred, er, spirits in the fidgety characters here. It's bedtime at Camp Badger, and Counselor Jim is encouraging six boys to get some shut-eye. But every time he turns off the lights, his charges protest that monsters are coming to get them. Indeed, a cutaway view of the boys' cabin reveals a toothy, tentacled beast concealed under the floor ("It comes awake in the dark"). The moon's reflection looks like "an eyeball on the ceiling"; and bats are predictably mistaken for vampires. Himmelman's (Wanted: Perfect Parents) text and cartoony illustrations offer not so much a story as a series of imagined scenarios. Rather than presenting these situations as purely frightful, however, Himmelman demonstrates that some fear of the dark is normal-and can be kind of silly. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.