WHEN LIONS ROAR

What to do when sudden or loud noises bring “the scary.”

Here, Harris works the same theme as Ed Emberley’s classic Go Away Big Green Monster (1993) but in a less abstract way. She catalogs upsetting sounds—from “When thunder booms! / When sirens blare!” to “When daddies yell! / When mommies holler!”—then suggests a remedy: shutting one’s eyes and ordering “Scary! Go away” until “the quiet is back” and the world again becomes a sunny, peaceful place. The big, short lines of text are printed in various colors; Raschka uses the same palette to depict, with his typically free-looking brushwork, an anxious child of indeterminate sex suspended, with minimal background figures and details, on broad white pages. Except perhaps for a dog’s bark, none of the noises are directly aimed at the child narrator. The level of “scary” is further reduced by showing Mommy hollering at a parking meter (or someone beyond it) and Daddy at something off the edge of the page rather than at each other.

A tried-and-true strategy, though the fright fades with unrealistic speed in this iteration.