Three hairy, smelly monsters pursue a clever child through three fairy-tale houses in Cotilde Perrin's Gotcha!, a slightly scary yet playfully droll lift-the-flap book.
The chase begins on the title page with a child dressed in a bear costume turning the page. Enter monster #1: "a nasty hairball with frightful fur and feculent feet... prowling, sniffing, searching" for the child, who hides in a brick house belonging to the Three Little Pigs. Monsters #2 and #3 follow suit, while the child evades them in Hansel and Gretel's gingerbread house and in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Each house has plenty to look at, with cutouts, flaps, foldouts and split pages that reveal what's behind closed doors and upstairs. The oversized pages filled with bold, saturated artwork showcase the creatures in all their stinky, "freakish" glory. This interactive fairy-tale hide-and-seek, which was translated from French by Daniel Hahn, is guffaw-eliciting and engaging. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader