Barbara DaCosta, author
Ed Young, illustrator
Little Brown Books / September, 2012
ISBN-13: 9780316203845
Late at night, when all is quiet and everyone is asleep, a ninja creeps silently through the house in search of treasure. Soon he reaches his ultimate goal…and gets a big surprise! Will the nighttime ninja complete his mission?
Stealth and silent, a ninja sets off on a midnight mission, breaking into a house to steal some treasure. He sneaks and balances, practiced and undetectable. And just as the sacred object is in his grasp, the lights flip on and his mother catches him, ice cream and spoon in his red-hot hands. Alas, the nighttime ninja is sent to bed, to dream of creeping and crawling another day. Young’s expressive collage artwork, built of fabric, paper, and bits of string, hums with vitality, even in the silence of midnight. The imagined ninja, in black silhouette, slithers from page to page, breaking out of dark, tightly organized frames unable to contain his ardent energy. Beneath these frames, debut author DaCosta’s spare, sinuous prose reinforces the ninja’s intrepid, surreptitious elegance (“Step by step, he balanced and leapt”). At the moment of climactic surprise, text and image together turn a stylistic corner, finding vernacular comfort in a contemporary Japanese home. With measured pacing, careful design, and a beautifully symbiotic partnership of word and image, this enormously appealing, timeless story promises to delight preschool audiences and families alike for years to come.
–Booklist (starred review), Thom Barthelmess