"One dark night, in a house on a hill," two children ask Papa to tell them a bedtime story. Grace, the older of the siblings, wants it to be a scary story (she has her wand, after all, and scary stories are okay when one has a wand on hand). Papa begins: "One night, two brave explorers and their dog were walking home through the forest. It was very, very... dark."
"Too scary!" Walter, Grace's little brother, exclaims, and Papa eases the fright factor and brings in the fireflies. Over and over, Papa weaves a scary story to please Grace and then adjusts to quell Walter's fear. Bethanie Deeney Murguia's page turns are impeccably timed in The Too-Scary Story: as Papa rapidly recalibrates, the page turns whip the reader back and forth. On one page, Grace, Walter and Papa are bathed in the warm, gentle colors of a brightly lit bedroom. On the next, the sentence completes in the deep, dark blues and blacks of an inhabited forest at night.
As Grace grows weary of Papa's shifting narrative and starts to complain, the too-tame story becomes overly scary--even for Grace. The dusky blue-green backgrounds of Walter's firefly bedtime story shift to blue-black and shadows reach from the edges, encroaching upon the children's space. Luckily, though, Grace has her wand. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness