Tuesday Storytime: Pumpkins

Continuing our month-long Halloween party;

Pumpkin Soup
Helen Cooper
ISBN: 0374361649
Lush oversized oils and wild imaginative scenes.

I really love this book a lot.  It's perfect for halloween storytimes for my area and age-group because it isn't about halloween or pumpkins, it's about friendship and quarrels and wild imagination and regrets and sacrificing and compromise, but it's GOT pumpkins and wild imaginations and scary possibilities, and walking out in the dark, so it gets at many of the same fears from an oblique approach. Similar, but a bit more obvious, is Bear Feels Scared, by Karma Wilson (another potential for later this month).  Anyway, it's beautiful and sweet and if I didn't always use it for pumpkins and halloween every year, it would go very well with Three By the Sea, by Mini Grey, which deals with essentially the same plot, and possibly The Lapsnatcher, by Bruce Coville or On Mother's Lap, by Ann Herbert Scott.

Duck & Goose Find a Pumpkin (boardbook)
Tad Hills
ISBN: 9780375858130
Duck & Goose series in miniature.  Cute, innocent, and faux-naive drawings.

Short and sweet.  Duckling and Gosling see Thistle (a swan cygnet, I believe?) wander by with a pumpkin, and they head off in an industrious search for one of their own, looking in allll the wrong places. Kids find it impossible to resist answering the series of questions with forceful "NO"s that get even louder and more excited and exasperated the longer the hapless babies look in silly places.  Thistle re-appears at the end to offer a pointed tip, and the quest ends in success.

Pumpkin Cat
Anne Mortimer
ISBN: 9780061874857
Sweet naturalistic drawings show the life-cycle of a pumpkin, from seed to jack-o-lantern.

Cat and Mouse are growing a pumpkin, and they walk through all the steps necessary to create a home for a plant and then make it grow. It gets a bit repetitive, as the call-and-response of "What now?" doesn't change AT ALL through the whole book.  Regardless, a very simple and factual explanation of where pumpkins come from, for the very littlest listeners, and the Cat and Mouse make for sweet and adorable narrators and proxies to watch.  The final page does say "Happy Halloween" as the Mouse makes the pumkin into a "surprise" for Cat (a jack-o-lantern), so be aware.

Juv Fiction: Ranger in Time: Long Road to Freedom, Kate Messner

Ranger in Time: Long Road to Freedom 

Kate Messner

ISBN: 9780545639217

Ranger is a flunked-out search and rescue dog with a magical first aid kit collar that sends him through time to people who need to be found or rescued - or both!

This is the first of this series I've read, and it appears to be the third or fourth book. Vague references are made to what seems like a gladiator/Roman setting, and perhaps the American West?  This one is set in the days of the underground railroad and of slaves escaping to try to avoid the brutality of the developing cotton market in the deep south.  Ranger pops back into time on the day that Sarah learns that her owner is selling her little brother Jesse down south, because he's not valuable to him any more.  Sarah decides to take matters into her own hands and take them both north to freedom.  Messner presents an incredibly accurate book (granted it's light on the gory details, and overall it's more positive and uplifting than a lot of accounts actually were) that focuses attention on the agency of the former slaves saving themselves, with the assistance of kind people across the country - white, black, free, and slave.  An even more powerful Author's Note at the end goes into details about the people and places in the story which are real, and about the resources and museums available.     

Tuesday Storytime: Scary Friends

It's OCTOBER!!!!

Yay!  Now I can use all my scary books and my monster books and my black cat books and my pumpkin books and really there are just too many good books to use for as few Tuesdays as there are in October.  If I had a storytime every day in October, I might get through them all.  Anyway - we start off the month gently, with a set of "scary" friends.

Leonardo the Terrible Monster
Mo Willems
ISBN: 0786852941
Willem's signature colored papers and oddly-placed figures in space.

Leonardo is a really terrible monster.  I mean, just horrible.  He can't scare anyone!  So he hatches a plan - to find a super-scaredy-cat kid and at least manage to scare ONE person.  Leonardo is so terrible at being a monster that he can't even manage that, so he makes a scary, big, decision, and finds something he can do wonderfully.



Spike, the Mixed-up Monster
Susan Hood, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
ISBN: 9781442406018
Bright colors and scribbly outlines make this fresh and energetic.  Mexican-Spanish phrases and styling.

Spike is an axolotl (its a real thing, go look it up) and he desperately wants to be a scary monster, but he's really tiny, and kindof cute.  At least, all the other creatures at the pond think so.  When a truly scary gila monster heads over, everyone else flees, and it's up to Spike to scare the other monster away!  He's never scared anyone yet - will he succeed this time?  I love that the "appearances are deceiving" message goes both ways in this story, and that Spike instantly offers help and encouragement.  A good message, with a good set of non gendered anthropomorphic characters.


Wolf's Coming!
Joe Kulka
ISBN: 9781575059303
Kulka's illustrations are dark and forboding and looming, with plenty of expressive faces.

A set of woodland creatures scurry and hide in rhyming sequences as a business-suited, square-shouldered, enormous wolf stalks through the woods, getting closer and closer to home.  A sharp eye (or multiple read-throughs) will reveal tiny little hints at a twist ending, but suffice it to say that all the build-up is for a totally different sort of shock than the kids (or parents) are expecting.