Jitterbug Jam: A Monster Tale
by Barbara Jean Hicks; illustrated by Alexis Deacon
There’s a boy under the bed! How’s a little monster supposed to get any sleep? Only Bobo’s granpa, the wise and fierce Boo-Dad, believes him, and coaches him to confront the scary human lurking at the edge of his nightmares.
A clever twist on an old story, right? But what happens when you take this inventive tale and shackle it to two competing ways of telling it? There’s the narrative itself, with its rural, homey inflections and colloquialisms: “lickety-split ’n’ spit fish”, for example, or the gratingly un-clever, “going to crumble like a week-old cookie.”
And then there’s Deacon’s take, with wickedly delightful Goth overtones in the Victorian-era monster home. Think snails or beetle prints instead of chintz and William Morris. The book is laid out like a graphic novel, giving Deacon the flexibility to move in panels across or down, or to zero in on specific images. The result: a more subtle, layered story than if illustrated in a straightforward, one-scene-per-page way.
The informal, breezy language and richly dark illustrations don’t mesh well, however, as if creating parallel fantasy worlds, each with its own vocabulary. This is Hicks’ debut as a children’s novelist, and while she’s off to a promising start, she could’ve stood some judicious pruning of verbal clunkers and clichés, which might’ve united words and art into a more seamless whole.
Rating: *\*\*\
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