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? With spare text and lush illustrations, Nighttime Ninja is a fun, adventure-filled story about the power of play and imagination. PreS-Gr 1-It's midnight and a ninja is sneaking through a silent house. He's creeping closer and closer to his target until suddenly, "the lights flash on!" In an unexpectedly humorous twist, the ninja turns out to be a little boy caught by his mother in his attempt to raid the kitchen. She confiscates his midnight snack and sends her little ninja back to bed. Young's austere, nearly abstract mixed-media collage illustrations are mostly black silhouettes of the ninja in various action poses, set against paper and fabric backgrounds. They perfectly complement DaCosta's spare but neatly suspenseful story. Pair this one with J. C. Phillipps's Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Be Noticed (Viking, 2009) and David Bruins's The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear (Kids Can, 2009) for a fun ninja-themed storytime.-Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova, formerly at Chappaqua Library, NYα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. *Starred Review* 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. Preschool-Grade 2. --Thom Barthelmess * "Young's expressive collage artwork, built of fabric, paper, and bits of string, hums with vitality, even in the silence of midnight...Beneath these frames, debut author DaCosta's spare, sinuous prose reinforces the ninja's intrepid, surreptitious elegance...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) "Succinct language full of vivid verbs describing the action sets the mood for Young's lushly textured illustrations...Good to share at bedtime with antsy adventurers."― Kirkus "A spare text loaded with tension paired with evocative illustrations make this a bedtime story that will be asked for again and again."― The Horn Book "Young's austere, nearly abstract mixed-media collage illustrations...perfectly complement DaCosta's spare but neatly suspenseful story."― School Library Journal "Wonderfully mysterious...[A] pitch-perfect bedtime read."― The Wall Street Journal Barbara DaCosta , as a child, was a precocious nighttime ninja, constantly climbing out of the crib in search of cookies and other interesting things. She has since cut back on the climbing and the cookies, but still enjoys finding the interesting things in life to write about. Nighttime Ninja is her first children's picture book. She makes her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ed Young is the illustrator of more than eighty books for children, including the Caldecott Medal-winning Lon Po Po , and the New York Times bestseller Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein. He has also written and illustrated The House Baba Built , which recounts his childhood in Shanghai. Born in China, Ed moved to the United States as a young man and pursued his love of art. Nighttime Ninja is the type of picture book Ed would have loved as a young boy. He currently lives in New York.