One Potato Review

Willems’s books are usually more interesting than their surfaces: wry, a little subversive, and entirely sympathetic when it comes to characters you think you’ve seen elsewhere. Here they’re a nerdy little guy with plenty of good reasons to feel miserable, and an incompetent monster determined to “scare the tuna salad out of someone.” This ends about where you would imagine, but there are some exuberant bits of storytelling along the way, and also a couple of inspired fellow monsters, including one with six mouths and 1642 teeth who nevertheless manages to seem charming. Because it’s not the monsters who are usually scary in the end; it’s the people who train them.