A young boy stretches awake and trots downstairs to find a creepy bird staring through the window. In a slight rhyming narrative similar to Poe's The Raven, the boy uses a series of metaphors to describe the bird. Each metaphor is followed by an illustration on a wordless spread: a king on a throne, a robber on a fence, etc. When the boy finally opens the door to chase away the bird, he discovers that  it's just a crow. / And now I see / that he was / just as scared as me. Blocks of text in shieldlike frames add little to the overall book design, but the torn-and-cut-paper compositions, in a rich palette of blues, reds, and golds, have an attractive balance of image and action. The text doesn't always scan, and the buildup doesn't pay off, but in the hands of a dramatic reader, the tale will elicit some laughs from the storytime crowd.--Del Negro, Janice Copyright 2007 Booklist

This send-up of Poe's "The Raven" seems mostly an occasion to showcase the first-time author/artist's hand-dyed torn- and cut-paper collages. "One morning I woke up sleepy,/ came downstairs to something creepy," says a small child of indeterminate gender, shown in pajamas peering through the front door at a crow perched on a fence. The child's eyes widen, vaudeville-style, as s/he notes the resemblance between the crow and the scary inhabitants of the child's imagination, all vividly pictured: a robber, a wizard and a pirate. Wandering far from the Poe original, Paul quickly abandons the project of duplicating the meter. She does a better job building up suspense visually, with tight shots of the child pulling the drapes apart, and she has even more fun with the spreads of the robber, the wizard and the pirate. Her collages favor bold compositions made up of surprisingly delicately patterned components. An enormous yellow-gold telescope dominates a view of the pirate on deck, for example, and readers will need to look more than once to realize that the roiling, white-crested waves in the picture are artfully torn paper, or to appreciate the careful suggestions of grain in the deck's wood floor. But the overall payoff is low (the child finally steps outside into the autumn morning, only to watch the crow fly off: "He was just as scared as me"), and there's little here to invite the repeat readings necessary for a close enough look at the art. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

PreS-Gr 3-In this clever and engaging picture-book homage to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," a young protagonist's overactive imagination generates scenes of ominous fantasy: "One morning I woke up sleepy,/came downstairs to something creepy./Outside the window sat something freaky/my eyes had never known." Suspense builds as the child peeks out again and again, each time imagining a frightening villain based solely on these furtive glimpses. Is the mysterious figure a proud and powerful king, a "slick robber on the roam," a spell-casting wizard, or a pirate "peering through a spyglass"? Each suspect is depicted in a wordless, darkly menacing spread. Finally, the youngster bravely opens the front door and realizes, "Oh,/it's just a crow./And now I see/that he was/just as scared as me." Using folksy cut- and torn-paper collage images, unusual angles, and exaggerated perspectives, Paul creates the excitable child's imaginings, frightening in a suspenseful, almost titillating manner, but without real terror. The illustrations allow readers to identify the bird long before the main character does. Children and parents alike will appreciate the protagonist's process of overcoming fears, and fans of slightly spooky stories will enjoy the tale's atmosphere.-Piper Nyman, Brookmeade Elementary School, Nashville, TN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Riffing on "The Raven" for her debut, Paul demonstrates that she's no Poe (yet, at least) when it comes to verse--but her shadowy, skewed-perspective paper-collage illustrations do create a properly brooding atmosphere. "One morning I woke up sleepy / came downstairs to something creepy. / Outside the window sat something freaky / my eyes had never known." Each successive glimpse of the interloper suggests to the young narrator an image--a glaring king on a throne, a smirking robber, a wizard, a pirate--that, at least in his imagination, becomes fleshed out with a turn of the page. The visitor's true identity is never in doubt, however (see title), and watching it fly away in the end, the lad realizes that it was just as frightened of him. Younger and more timorous audiences will appreciate the take-it-or-leave-it quality of the suspense. (Picture book. 7-9) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.