THE CHILD CRUNCHER

A boring day brightens right up for a young lass when she’s kidnapped by a hulking brute on a horse and carried off to a distant cave. Alas, her hope of a fun adventure is premature. Not only does her clumsy captor need rescuing when he nearly tumbles down a cliff, but after he responds with “lots of words I couldn’t understand” to her efforts to tidy the dingy den and announces that she’s about to become his breakfast, she realizes that he’s just “an ordinary old child cruncher.” Easily leaving the villain behind, she gallops home to her distracted dad—who invites her to pick out a bedtime story. “Nothing too frightening, though. Otherwise you won’t sleep.” The child radiates a smiling self-confidence in van Hout’s cartoon art, which reflects the narrative’s breezy tone, and the clumsy, blustering Bad Guy—endowed with both a ferocious scowl and a fuzzy plush bunny—comes across as far more comic than threatening. Even younger and more sensitive children will be left smiling by this droll, if brief, import. (Picture book. 5-8)