Baby Monkey, Private Eye
by Brian Selznick and David Serlin; illus. by Brian Selznick
Primary    Scholastic    192 pp.
2/18    978-1-338-18061-9    $16.99

Selznick, who won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for his 534-page picture book/novel hybrid The Invention of Hugo Cabret (rev. 3/07), here presents with coauthor and husband Serlin an almost-two-hundred-page…easy reader/film-noir homage. In five chapters, diminutive gumshoe Baby Monkey solves a series of cases (“Chapter One: The Case of the Missing Jewels!” “Chapter Two: The Case of the Missing Pizza!”). Each follows a predictable pattern, with occasional small variation: Baby Monkey is waiting in his office (think The Maltese Falcon); a client arrives; Baby 
Monkey looks for clues and takes notes; he has a snack…then puts on his pants, the last a complicated procedure. After some perfectly timed page-turns showing the getting-dressed process, “Now Baby Monkey is ready!” He leaves his office, solves the case, and captures the culprit: “Hooray for Baby Monkey!” New readers will delight in the details in both the brief text and the shadowy, noirish black-and-white illustrations with pops of red. Baby Monkey looks like a cute little monkey, albeit with anthropomorphized facial expressions; and the spot-on slapstick pacing of the putting-on-pants sequences will have viewers giggling for days. The decorations and books in Baby Monkey’s office change thematically (and sophisticatedly) with each case — see the appended key (e.g., “Baby from Madame Roulin and Her Baby, 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh [1853-1890]”). Also appended with an index (“Anderson, Marian: 23, 47”) and a totally-made-up-but-plausible-sounding bibliography of Baby Monkey’s books (“Zanzibar, Jeanine. Healthy Snacks for Growing Primates. Madison, WI: Harlow Books, 1994”).

From the May/June 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Making a Difference.