Creepy Pair of Underwear!
by Aaron Reynolds; illus. by Peter Brown
Primary    Simon    48 pp.
8/17    978-1-4424-0298-0    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-1-4814-7670-6    $10.99

This companion book to the author-illustrator team’s Creepy Carrots humorously spookifies another not-usually-scary item. While underwear-shopping with his mom, young bunny Jasper Rabbit spies a pair of green glow-in-the-dark undies with a Frankenstein’s-monster face and thinks they’re “glorious.” But once he’s alone in bed in the dark, and they’re glowing their “ghoulish, greenish glow,” Jasper’s fears take flight. And his fears are not unfounded. No matter what Jasper does to dispose of the offending undies — throw them in the trash, mail them to China, cut them into bits — they always make their way back. Humorous text (“‘What’s the matter with you?’ his mom asked. ‘You’re so jittery lately.’ ‘Nothing!’ he yelped. A grown rabbit couldn’t be terrified of his underpants”) captures Jasper’s age-appropriate not-quite-a-big-kid dilemma. Brown’s noirish digitally colored and composited pencil illustrations — black, white, gray, and Day-Glo green — heighten both the silliness and the spookiness that are on display in equal measure.

From the September/October 2017 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.