Maddie Frost’s 2025 picture book Little Boo is fun but uneven.
The drawings all kinds of fun: distorted and impossible in entertaining ways. There are some nice details here. One of these is visible on the cover: spelling “books” as “boooks,” so the idea of ghosts/haunting is casually present everywhere. The core scenario is surprisingly relatable, given the undead/supernatural nature of the characters: Little Boo’s big brother ghost had gotten along with Little Boo when he was younger, but Little Boo is irritating now, so the brother swaps Little Boo for Little Howl, thinking Little Howl will be less irritating.
And for a while, he’s right…until Little Howl goes crazy after being offered a snack, and chomps on just about everything. After high jinks comes close to destroying the ghost house, they swap back, and everyone Learns a Valuable Lesson about Getting Along.
When I say it was uneven, I mean several things. First, the ghost parents are essentially absent. They aren’t gone, like the parents in The Cat in the Hat, or left behind, like the parents in Where the Wild Things Are. They’re just…not active. This is a question in itself, but it also makes things weirdly easy. (The older brother should have had to sneak Little Boo away, explain Little Howl’s presence, clean up after him, etc.) Next, if Howl and Little Howl are werewolves (as I assumed), why don’t they act like werewolves (change, lose control, etc.). If they are just wolves, how do they talk? Why does Little Howl go crazy over a snack? And third, a very grown-up concern: where do little ghosts come from? The other creatures (wolf-things, witches) have bodies, but ghosts…?
Kids might not care about the last, but I would argue they’d feel the unevenness of the first two issues.
But individual images are a blast.
