Only an absolute monster would eat a kid, right? So why do the children keep disappearing...? Marcus Cutler's sly and subversive picture book I Do Not Eat Children cautions readers to take a narrator's word with a grain of salt--and shows that some monsters might not be able to take what they're dishing out.
Ten children in a line fill the bottom of a vast double-page spread. The crowd includes a knitter, a trumpeter, a pig-tailed reader, a few athletes--oh, and a giant orange monster in green and yellow striped pants. "I do not eat children," the monster announces. "I would never eat a child," it admonishes on the next page, although a trumpet now sits on the ground amongst only nine children. "What do you think I am...," it chides as a soccer ball bounces by. (We're down to eight.) "...A monster?" Seven--only a yellow belt remains where a martial artist once stood. With each page turn, a child vanishes from the line-up, leaving behind some small vestige of their presence. Their numbers dwindle until we find our monster standing menacingly over the lone remaining child, who stares back at it. "I do eat liars," the pig-tailed reader announces.
Cutler (illustrator of Dear Polar Bears and the Lark series) makes terrific use of white space and the book's format, using the landscape of the open book to emphasize the dwindling cast of characters. Thanks to minimal text on most spreads and several quite expressively illustrated wordless pages, Cutler invites readers to focus on visual storytelling details like the detritus left in each child's wake and the revealing contents of the monster's belches. The unreliable narrator is a hefty, pointy-eared, vermillion-orange beast with bold, blockish eyebrows. It exudes the aura of one who is simply not to be trusted. Such dark humor evokes the minimalistic and grim morality of Maurice Sendak's Pierre (1962), while the cheery palette and charmingly specific illustrative details tilt the barbarity closer to the humor in Ryan T. Higgins's delightful We Don't Eat Our Classmates (2018). This tale of comeuppance employs page turns to ratchet up tension, and will likely hold listeners rapt during read-alouds.
Cutler tees up and then tickles reader expectations in this deliciously dark tale in which a mischief-maker ultimately gets (ahem, becomes?) its just desserts. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf
Shelf Talker: A scampish beast isn't prepared to take what it's been dishing out in a minimalistic and darkly humorous story of one hungry monster who definitely, nope, no way, does NOT eat children.