Tuesday Storytime: More Creepy Fun

These were picked out by my coworker for a morning of spooky sillyness.

Click, Clack, Boo!
Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Betsy Lewin
The book sticks to the classic format, but here we're substituting creepy and silly halloween sounds into the mix. Funny and light.

Me and My Dragon: Scared of Halloween
David Biedrzycki
The irrepressible boy and his bright red pet dragon (who may or may not be imaginary) navigate the sometimes scary rituals and proceedings of a traditional American-style Halloween, and discover the fun behind the scary costumes and dark nights out.

Little Blue Truck's Halloween
Alice Schertle, illustrated by Jill McElmurry
A cute "lift-the-flap" book features Little Blue Truck and friends as they head into a cozy Halloween night. Very good for kids hesitant about the whole deal, or parents trying to navigate the line between religion and culture.

Tuesday Storytime: Pumpkin Time

It's October and that means Halloween! Getting into the spirit early with a trio of pumpkin-related stories.

Ten Orange Pumpkins
Stephen Savage
A fun, slightly spooky, counting book - watch out for the enormous spider towards the end!

Pumpkin Cat
Anne Mortimer
Cat and Mouse prepare all spring and summer for a pumpkin, and when it's finally grown in the fall, Mouse has a final surprise for Cat.

Boo! Haiku
Deanna Caswell, illustrated by Bob Shea
This "guess who" format is fun with the haiku rhythms, and the guesses aren't too hard, as long as the adults are willing to offer additional clues - even then "skeleton" was a bit over their heads. Overall tho, very satisfactory as a creepy fun call and response book.

Tuesday Storytime: Monstrous families

I also had Amanda Noll and Howard McWilliam's fantastic I Need My Monster cued up, but the crowd was predominantly littles, so it would have been too long. Highly recommended. 

I Am A Witch's Cat

Harriet Muncaster

ISBN: 9780062229144

Looooooove this book so much. The miniatures/dollhouse/collage illustrations are fantastic, the story is cute, and the premise is perfectly executed. Really excellent.

Go Away, Big Green Monster!

Ed Emberley

ISBN: 9780316236539

Classic cut-out reveal book. Simple, no nonsense, super fast, super fun for the kids to see how the monster grows and disappears. 

Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters a lullabye

Jane Yolen, illustrated by Kelly Murphy

ISBN: 9780763642013

Slow and very sedate, but a welcome change in tone from most upbeat or quirky halloween/monster books. This one is sweet and gentle, and ramps down smoothly from the end of a school day to the nearly endless rituals of bedtime. Sweet.

Tuesday Storytime: Creeping towards Halloween!

This storytime was also done (last minute I might add) by my co-worker.

10 Trick-or-Treaters
Janet Schulman, illustrated by Linda Davick
ISBN: 9780385736145
Small format book is just the right balance of creepy and anticipatory, with bright colors and cheerful thrills as we count down the numbers from a fun night out through to bedtime.

Minerva Louise at Halloween
Janet Morgan Stoeke
ISBN: 9780525421498
Minerva Louise is everyone's favorite slightly addled chicken, and this time around she's bringing her Amelia-Bedelia observations to Halloween night. Cute and sweet and extremely light-hearted.

Little Blue Truck's Halloween (lift-the-flap board book)
Alice Schertle, Jill McElmurry
ISBN: 9780544772533
The character of the Little Blue Truck is cute in his own right, with a series of short stories that are all adorable, but this lift the flap book brings the character and the whimsical Dick-and-Jane illustrations over for trick-or-treating, and it's a great fun little short trip.

Tuesday Storytime: October is here! Spooky Storytimes FTW

Halloween time is here again! My favorite holiday of the year, with my favorite month of fun storytimes about monsters and witches and good Halloween fun.

This week we're seeing monsters in three different fun environments.

Monster Chefs
Brian and Liam Anderson
ISBN: 9781596438088
Four monster chefs are caught off-guard by the monster king's demand for something different to eat besides eyeballs and ketchup, and three of them fail miserably, but the fourth finds a pastry chef, and starts a monster culinary revolution!

Boo-La-La Witch Spa
Samantha Berger, illustrated by Isabel Roxas
ISBN: 9780803738867
Cute walkthru of spas and their services and experiences, all with a witchy gloss. Skipped some sections because we have very small attendees this time, but it's spread-based so it's easy to skip past bits at leisure.

Monsters Love School
Mike Austin
ISBN: 9780062286185
The first day of school is fun for all, even little monsters!

Tuesday Storytime: Happy Halloween!

A cute set of books for Halloween, picked by my partner.

Trick or Treat
Leo Landry
ISBN: 9780547249698
Oliver the ghost is hosting a Halloween party for all his spooky friends, but one of the invites goes astray into the perfectly ordinary neighborhood house next door, allowing a pair of cute trick-or-treaters the chance to attend their first REAL Halloween party. All goes well, and Oliver ends up invited to a party himself!

Ten Orange Pumpkins
Stephen Savage
ISBN: 9780803739383
Graphically intense (all oranges and blacks and grey-scaled-desaturated colors) counting book with really nifty illustrations, and a serviceable "story" to accompany the counting.

Boo to You!
Lois Ehlert
ISBN:9781416986256
A clever crew of mice band together to outwit a mean cat in this Halloween-adjacent story made of fall-items-and-papercraft collages. 

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween is Coming

One week til Halloween, and because of the shared schedule, it's the first time in about 10 years that I will NOT be doing a storytime on Halloween. So I did some really cute Halloween prep books this week instead.

And Then Comes Halloween
Tom Brenner, illustrated by Holly Meade
ISBN: 9780763636593
This is an excellent Halloween book. It has a lot of atmospheric fall details, and lots of focus on the seasons changing and on very generic fall decorating with corn stalks and scarecrows, and only really gets into the Halloween-specific stuff right at the end. The focus is also on the creative process of thinking up and creating your own costume, and on the community fun of trick-or-treating in a group and sorting and swapping candy together. Very lighthearted and informative, with really lovely language.

Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin
Tad Hills
ISBN: 9780375858130 (board book)
I was lucky that this was a very small group, because this is a pretty small board book format. Duck and Goose and Thistle appear in this really short story, and I ask for a lot of audience interaction to drag it out a bit longer. Thistle has a very nice pumpkin, and Duck and Goose decide they want one too, so they go in search of it, with not much luck until Thistle reappears with a hint.

Happy Halloween, Biscuit!
Alyssa Satin Capucilli, illustrated by Pat Schories
ISBN: 9780694012206 (page-end-flaps)
Biscuit and his little girl are prepping for Halloween, which means the little girl is prepping, and Biscuit is getting into messes and generally being an adorable pest, revealed by the flaps on each of the far left side pages.  Sweet and gentle and with cute little "mysteries" to solve or questions to ponder on each spread.

Tuesday Storytime: Monster Bedtimes

There are SO MANY monster books out there now! It's awesome!

My Monster Mama Loves Me So
Laura Leuck, illustrated by Mark Buehner
ISBN: 9780688168667
A monster child narrates roughly over a day explaining how the mama monster does things to show her love. Touching and silly-gross at the same time.

Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters
Jane Yolen, illustrated by Kelly Murphy
ISBN: 9780763642013
A pair of school-age monster (siblings?) race home from school and run through their monstrous bedtime routine before settling down to sleep at the end.

Goodnight Little Monster
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Bonnie Leick
ISBN: 9780761456834
A VERY CUTE toddler monster goes through an exhaustive and inclusive bedtime routine, this time from the mama's perspective. Really seriously adorable, but man those spiders on the end-papers are gonna be the death of me.

Tuesday Storytime: Branded Characters do Halloween

I have a complicated relationship with "branded" characters like Pete the Cat, or Mittens the kitten, or Arnold, or the Berenstain Bears, or Ladybug Girl, Angelina or Fancy Nancy. On the one hand, I like them because they establish a character that children can "know" and be attached to, and ask for by name. "Where is Pete the Cat?" or "Do you have any new Fancy Nancy?" is a powerful question to be able to ask; to be a child and come into a library and KNOW that there's something you'll probably like. It's the kid equivalent of our adult patrons who read every single Nora Roberts but won't touch JD Robb (even though they're the same person), and the impetus behind everlasting series by Patterson or Evanovich. There's a formula and a character that is comforting and familiar and enjoyable. I get that.

But.

On the flip side, a lot of kid's writing can get VERY formulaic (to be clear, so can adult series), especially when a beloved character is the only thru-line. And while I have less than no objections to kids taking these sorts of books home and loving them forever (I actually encourage it, and fight for them to be included in our catalog) I have to say that I don't really like to have them be too much a part of storytime. I really don't want to sound classist or snobby, but part of having a storytime is to present a whole lot of types and styles of literature to kids, so they learn by repetition about the patterns of narrative and characterisation and plot-twists and tropes and all that. And to be honest, character books often don't have much of any of that, because they can ride on the success of their character. (I don't blame the authors and creators for this - they need to eat just like everyone else) Not all of them do - I find that Fancy Nancy is pretty consistently well-done, and the Biscuit books are also well plotted for their target age - but a decent number of them you can just read them and realize that the writer is coasting (or that a committee wrote it for a spec; "I need a Christmas book for a promo tie-in: have the Llama Llama family do Christmas!"). And that's not good.

So I don't have a RULE against using characters in storytime, but I do try to keep it to a minimum, or at least to be aware that I need to vet the quality of character books just as severely as I do any other title I consider.

All that said, Halloween is a fun season to look at branded characters, so that's what my partner went with this time around. I don't know that all of these would have made the cut with me, but there's nothing objectionable about them. That's why its good to have multiple storytellers: it's important to have different perspectives and approaches on display to the families and kids.

Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins
James Dean
ISBN: 9780062304186
A straightforward printing of the "Five Little Pumpkins" song/rhyme, with the visually-distinctive Pete the Cat illustrations.

Happy Halloween, Mittens
Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Susan Kathleen Hartung
ISBN: 9780061702228 ("I Can Read" book)
Mittens the kitten "helps" with Halloween prep in this extremely gentle and light-hearted gloss of the holiday.

Herbster Readers: The Halloween Costume Contest
Cecilia Minden and Joanne Meier, illustrated by Bob Ostrom
ISBN: 9781602532175
Herbie the Bear and his school pals spend most of the book brainstorming out costume ideas so they can win the school contest this year.

Tuesday Storytime: October Already!

The month of October is a happy time for my storytime selecting; as it becomes essentially a month-long celebration of Halloween and all things spooky. This is my partner's first October, and she's off to a great start:

Me and My Dragon: Afraid of Halloween
David Biedrzycki
ISBN: 9781580896580
The boy and his adorable bright red dragon confront the frights and startlements of Halloween, and decide it's not that bad after all.

Penguin and Pumpkin
Salina Yoon
ISBN: 9780802737335
A little longer than it seems like it should be: Penguin heads out away from the ice with a pack of friends to see what "fall" is like, but baby brother Pumpkin has to stay home, as he's not quite big enough. (Serious questions about given names in this world remain unanswered) When Penguin and crew come back with fall leaves and pumpkins for all, they do what they can to give baby Pumpkin a chance to experience fall himself.

Crankenstein
Samantha Berger, illustrated by Dan Santat
ISBN: 9780316126564
Crankenstein is a very scary monster. Have you seen it? Check around when there are annoying or disappointing situations, or when life just doesn't go quite right. Crank will vanish sometimes, but it will always be back. A funny sideways view of childhood fits and grumps works perfectly for this time of year.

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween Cats

I really love cats, and when I found that I had enough books (pulled to find a suitable candidate for the Edgar Allen Poe storytime) I decided that even though it was the day after Halloween, I'd do one last Halloween storytime featuring the best of the bunch.

I Am a Witch's Cat
Harriet Muncaster
ISBN: 9780062229144
Adorable girl-child in a cat costume in spreads of miniature-created doll-house like environments.

The setting and storyline seem very British to me, but that just adds to the charm.  A delightfully precocious narrator "witch cat" girl explains seriously why her mother is a witch, because of all the (totally mundane) activities that the girl has imagined into a more interesting reality.  The story progresses beautifully through mom's coven meeting (book club or coffee klatch) until the end, where we see mom soaring off on a broomstick.  Maybe the little girl was right after all?  DELIGHTFUL.

Black Cat Creeping
Teddy Slater, illustrated by Aaron Boyd
ISBN: 9781402719790
Cute little black kitten has no home, but he follows his nose (and some trick-or-treaters) and finds the best treat of all at the end of the road.

I love stories where sweet cute little animals get adopted at the end, but this is where I feel obligated to issue the public service warning to spay and neuter your pets, don't let them wander free (unless they're microchipped and collared) and to be careful with your own black cats and dogs around Halloween night so that bad things don't happen to helpless animals who rely on us for their entire lives.


Boo to You
Lois Ehlert
ISBN: 9781416986256
Ehlert's story isn't Halloween themed, but her signature cut-out and layered collages are certainly creepy enough to qualify.

Ehlert is always stunning.  Her collages are textural and layered and so interesting to look at.  This one is no different, but I have to say her grotesque cat even gives me pause.  That grimace on the cover - yow.  From a mouse's perspective, probably fairly accurate.  If a kid likes this story and have pretty good tolerance for mayhem, might I suggest a bedtime read of The Rescuers by Margary Sharp (yes, what the Disney movie was based on, and YES the book is a lot better, and nearly nothing like the movies at all).  If the kids like that one, there's about six more, all in the same vein of brave mice, scary cats and dogs, and suuuuper evil villains who don't actually do much on-screen.

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween Prep

It was a couple of weeks before Halloween, and I was still working my way through my tons of lovely Halloween and monster books.  This time around I focused on fears of Halloween (either parental or kid-centric) and picked a trio of reassuring monster mashes.

Me and My Dragon: Scared of Halloween
David Biedrzycki
ISBN: 9781580896597
The cute duo from Me and My Dragon handle big Halloween fears.

This one is more fun if you're familiar with the Me and My Dragon book, but even so, it's pretty obvious that the dragon isn't really the one who's apprehensive about Halloween.  Friends and family are reassuring, and the boy uses psychologically-appropriate positive self-talk to encourage himsel-SCUSE ME, his dragon, and everything turns out to be fun and enjoyable.

Where's My Mummy?
Carolyn Crimi, illustrated by John Manders
ISBN: 9780763631963
A baby mummy starts to play hide-and-shriek with his Mommy mummy, but gets lost.

I think I'll probably be reading (or suggesting) this book for my whole career.  Baby mummy is playing hide-and-shriek before bed, but now he can't find Mommy mummy anywhere.  He wanders the graveyard, swamp, and woods searching for her, and finding creepy (but helpful and caring) grownup neighbors instead, all prepping their own selves for bed in various ways, and eventually ends up in the woods, scared by something truly terrifying - a mouse!  Mommy mummy is instantly there to save the day and provide reassurance and a return to the bedtime routine.  Really really really cute.

Not Very Scary
Carol Brendler, illustrated by Greg Pizzoli
ISBN:97803743551470
Melly counts up scary creatures on her walk over to a Halloween party, where she meets them again.

Melly is headed to her cousin's Halloween party, and she's a little bit nervous that it will be too scary for her.  As she heads down the street, the ever-increasing numbers of creepy Halloween creatures in this cumulative counting book make her more and more nervous, until she gets to the party and is reassured to realize they're not very scary after all.

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.

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween

Halloween is this weekend!  Yay!

I very much wanted to read the newest Ladybug Girl book from David Soman and Jacky Davis (Ladybug Girl and the Dress-up Dilemma) because Ladybug Girl!  Halloween!  Costumes!  But it was rainy and nasty out, so we had a room full of babies, and it was just too long to suit.  Maybe next year!

At the Old Haunted House
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Nate Wragg
ISBN: 9781477847695
Takes the venerable "Over in the Meadow" rhyme and re-sets it in a spooky haunted mansion.

Sweet and slightly spooky, we have a house-full of beasties and haunts; everything from black cats to spiders to ghosts to werewolves, all doing various spooky things to the Over in the Meadow pattern of call and response.  The illustrations are cute, and the payoff at the end is quick and a little abrupt - a set of trick-or-treating kids gets invited into a monster party at the house (which is what all the scary actions from before were in preparation for).  Fun and the close relation to the nursery rhyme makes it less likely to give offense.

10 Trick-or-Treaters
Janet Schulman, illustrated by Linda Davick
ISBN: 9780385736145
Another variation of a nursery rhyme has a party of costumed trick-or-treaters slowly dwindling as the night wears on.

This one is adorable.  We have our line of trick-or-treaters, which gets whittled down rapidly as the participants are scared in turns by various animals or other costumed people (or dragged off to bed by their parents) and as the countdown winds to a close, we end with our last brave soul in bed, dreaming sugar-fueled dreams of Halloween.  Again, the very determinedly pastel and lighthearted artwork and the resemblance to the counting rhyme make this a most inoffensive option.

Happy Halloween, Emily!
Claire Masurel, illustrated by Susan Calitri
ISBN: 0448426919
Emily the bunny is a bit concerned about the Halloween Parade coming up.  Will it be too scary?

I like this one because it's very straightforward about the potential for scary things on Halloween, but emphasizes that they're not real, only pretend, and only people that you know already dressing up strangely.  Emily is a little hesitant about the potential for scares at the Halloween Parade, especially since her three friends are super excited about the "horrible monsters" "spooky ghosts" and "scary dinosaurs" that will be there.  Back at home Emily reassures herself and her baby brother (a good audience stand-in) that her witch costume isn't "too scary" before her mother in a very silly bunny-eared ghost costume tries to scare her, and her father does likewise in a scarecrow outfit.  Again, nothing even remotely scary about any of the appearances.  Family all together, they head for the Parade, where her friends are dressed as the scary things they were predicting, but they aren't scary at all.  Even the parade is shown in broad daylight, and all of the costumes are light-hearted and gentle.  I love that it puts attention on the worries of young children, while staying focused on the goal - to keep them from being actually scared of a mostly lighthearted child-centered holiday.

Tuesday Storytime: Prepping for Halloween

I Am a Witch's Cat
Harriet Muncaster
ISBN: 9780062229144
Meticulous miniature dioramas are adorable mundane counterparts to the wild claims in the text.

Previously reviewed here.  Still adorable.  No worries from any parents or kids, and a few chuckles at the conflation of the "mommy book club" with a coven.


Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin
Tad Hills
ISBN: 9780375858130
(Board Book) Short and sweet in the Duck and Goose tradition, good for audience interaction.

Duck and Goose books are usually just a smidge too basic for me to use in storytimes.  I'm sure the kids would love it, but I try not to subject myself or the parents to very simplistic "baby books" any more than I have to.  This one is an exception because I try very hard for my Halloween books to be lighthearted, family-centric, and generally utterly inoffensive.  Very simple set up has Thistle (Duck and Goose's occasional friend) wandering by with a pumpkin, spurring the young friends to acquire one of their own.  A series of spreads has them looking in all sorts of unlikely places, until Thistle reappears at the end to drop a much-needed hint about the pumpkin patch.

Hedgehug's Halloween
Text by Benn Sutton, concept and art by Dan Pinto
ISBN: 9780061961045
Colorful and blocky collage in textural swathes of bright or moody colors.

I'm not super thrilled about the artwork here, as I feel it's a bit too small for as busy and stylized as it is.  I wish it were a larger book.  That said, the story is adorable, and the pictures are very clear and understandable despite the blocky collage and rough-edged textures.  Hedgehug has forgotten about the yearly Halloween party in the forest, and he and his friends are desperately trying to find him a costume, but his prickles keep ruining things.  As the party begins, and he's still sans costume, he trudges through the forest sadly, but there's a three-headed big thing chasing after him!  It's his friends, with one last super-duper attempt at a costume, but this time they're prepared for the spikes.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Monster Families

I love October.  Halloween for weeks on end.  We have spooky books up on display, and I get to read about monsters and mummies and zombies to impressionable kids from now til November.

Zombelina
Kristyn Crow, illustrated by Molly Idle (Flora and the Flamingo)
ISBN: 9780802728036
Way too sweet to be scary.  A zombie girl learns to be a ballerina, and tackles stage fright.

Previously reviewed here.  Still love it, still the sweetest story, but this time around the theme hit more solidly on the family support of her passion.


Where's My Mummy?
Carolyn Crimi (Rock n' Roll Mole), illustrated by John Manders
ISBN: 9780763643379
Woefully undersized hardcover edition has a cute little mummy meeting traditional "monsters."

Despite using and loving this book, I've somehow managed to not review it yet!  This is a cute little "reversal of expectations" book.  Little mummy is playing hide-and-shriek (which really, with small kids, is roughly the truth) with his mommy mummy, but she's either too busy or really incompetent at the game, so he's off searching in various scary environments for her.  First the graveyard, where he meets Bones, then the swamp where he meets the Blob, then a dark cave where he finds Drac.  The pint-sized roly-poly mummy child is totally unimpressed with seeing these friends or neighbors, who are all prepping for bed themselves (brushing teeth, washing faces and ears) but warn the little tyke of "things" that lurk in the darkness.  Pooped, with still no mommy mummy, he rests at the base of a tree until a mouse appears.  THAT's the scare-jump all the parents were waiting for, and mommy mummy is immediately there to rescue, comfort, and take to bed.  ADORABLE.

Goodnight, Little Monster
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Bonnie Leick
ISBN: 9780761456834
Sweet lush soft-edged watercolor-looking illustrations of an adorable baby monster at bedtime.

This is such a sweet book, but I have a hard time reading it because the endpapers are COVERED in giant nasty spiders.  I "screwed my courage to the sticking place" as best I could, because it really is a sweet story, and because I more often read the slightly sillier and more upbeat My Monster Mama Loves Me So, but I did that one too recently to repeat.  So, I braved the spiders, and had two mamas ask me if they could have the book afterwards.  Courage is rewarded!  In the story, mama is putting baby to bed, and it's just as traditional and standard as you could ask: from bathtime to bedtime snack to toothbrushing to the under-bed-monsters (er, children) check, and the temporary forgetting of the nightlight.  The pictures really are sweet, once you get past all the spiders.

Picture Book/Modern Fairy Tale: Pumpkin Light, by David Ray

I really wanted to like this, as I love Halloween, and I really enjoy modern created fairy tales (Jane Yolen's Girl in the Golden Bower is a perfect example), but I was not entranced or even interested in this stolid story with little magic or interest, and painfully workmanlike illustrations.

Pumpkin Light
David Ray
ISBN: 0399220283

I wanted to like it - a book about an early Americana farm boy who loves pumpkins and gets cursed?  Sounds great!  Sadly, the author/illustrator bit off more than he could chew, with both the story and the illustrations getting away from him right from the beginning.  This is a quote from the set-up of the story; "Now there was one other thing Angus loved as much as his mother and father and almost as much as pumpkins and that was to draw and paint."

Just, no.  I'm sorry to be blunt, but those are not the lines of a good story, or a good tale to read aloud to someone.  Sadly, it was like that all the way through.


Bare bones story:
Pumpkin-loving artistic kid stays up too late on Halloween, gets sent to bed without supper, has a very complex bad dream, and wakes to find everything better again.

Longer version:
Angus was born in the fall, under a pumpkin sun, and loves pumpkins and art.  He always goes to town on Halloween to draw the jack o'lantern display at the General Store, then goes home and hangs his pictures on his bedroom walls.  One Halloween he stays too late drawing and runs home (past jeering children who are out there being hateful for no reason at all) and returns home after dark to angry parents who send him to sleep with no dinner, and no pumpkin pie, and no time to hang his drawings on the walls.

Suddenly he's in a hayloft in a barn overlooking his house, watching his mother set a pumpkin pie out on the windowsill to cool.  He's hungry, so he sneaks over, steals the pie, and hides under a scarecrow (why god why) to eat it.  The spirit of the scarecrow (because there has to be a scarecrow spirit) is angry at him for stealing the pie when he was sent to bed with  no supper.  So the scarecrow turns him into a dog, and names him Autumn (Why?  Who knows.) and passes on the terms of the curse - "Autumn" has to spend every night in the barn loft, guarding a "magic pumpkin" (wtf?) until "a forgiving soul carves it and releases the power to change you back into a boy."  Ok.

So now Angus' parents are super sad because their little boy is gone, but the little dog keeps them company, except it insists on sleeping in the loft (and no one asks why this dog is so attached to the loft, or ever goes to check).  A whole bloody year later, somehow the parents magically know the dog's name is Autumn (not even going there) and the boy-dog finally gets a clue that perhaps he can trick Mom into carving the magic pumpkin for her (apparently only once-a-year) pumpkin pie.

He nips and drags at her until she gets up there, sees this lovely pumpkin, and (still not asking WHY a pumpkin is in her hayloft) she drags it home and begins to cut it open, but overcome with memories, decides to try to carve it into a jack o'lantern like her missing son would have done.  The pumpkin lights up magically, and yay, Angus is back!   About here is where I notice that dad has gone suspiciously missing through this whole ordeal.

The light from the pumpkin grows brighter and blinds the magically recovered boy, and when he blinks to clear his eyes, he's home in bed, with his parents hanging up his pictures on his walls, and a pumpkin pie smell wafting in from the kitchen (she baked a fresh one for breakfast, apparently).  A lengthy (everything about this book is lengthy) coda explains how Angus always afterwards treasured a special painting of a dog and a pumpkin.


Ok, so this is obviously trying for Film!Oz territory, where it's all a dream, or is it!?  However, it just seemed like it was trying too hard.  A scarecrow spirit cursing a boy for disobedience ought to be right up fairy-tale alley, easy to accept, but it fell flat, and begged for an explanation.  Why a dog?  Why the deal with guarding the pumpkin?  What would happen if he didn't?  It just didn't make any sense, but so much time was spent explaining things that didn't need explaining, it made the magical (and not-explained) personages and events stick out terribly.

I hate when this sort of thing happens, because I want to fix the story, and it isn't mine, and I can't do anything about it.  Perhaps I'll write my own Halloween fairy-tale with a jack o'lantern obsessed child and see if I can do any better.

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween!

 I love Halloween storytimes!

We started off with the delightful Zombelina, moved through the equally new and strikingly illustrated Ten Orange Pumpkins, and ended on a lighthearted note with Happy Halloween, Biscuit.

Zombelina
Kristyn Crow, illustrated by Molly Idle (Flora and the Flamingo)
ISBN: 9780802728036
Sweet green zombie gets stage fright at her dance recital, until her spooky family arrives to cheer.

This book is ADORABLE.  I will probably read it on non-Halloween nights just as a dancing or performance book.  (Maybe with Rock n Roll Mole?)  Zombelina loves dancing at home, and her loving parents finally take her out to buy supplies and start in dance classes.  Her classmates are a little weirded out by this limb-losing ballerina, but her teacher is accepting and encouraging, and she blooms.  Until the night of her recital, where she gets stage fright, and starts acting like an actual zombie and scares her classmates and audience away.  Her family arrives and cheers her on in a more familiar way, and she performs beautifully, then is whisked home for a celebratory dinner.  Boatloads of wordplay and clever jokes with the illustrations had the parents laughing, while the kids seemed to enjoy our perky adorable heroine.


Ten Orange Pumpkins: A Counting Book
Stephen Savage
ISBN: 9780803739383
Already reviewed.

This one worked very well in the middle spot.  I got through the spider with aplomb (I thought) and the kids especially liked the alligators in the river and the skeleton pirate crew.


Happy Halloween, Biscuit
Alyssa Satin Capucilli, illustrated by Pat Schories
ISBN: 9780694012206
Lift-the-flap book showing Biscuit the puppy hiding or getting into minor trouble on Halloween.

Super cute and as inoffensive as it is possible to be and still cover dressing up in costume and trick-or-treating.  Biscuit and his little girl go out to the pumpkin patch to make a jack-o-lantern, pick out costumes to wear, meet costumed friends, and get treats from a family-member's house before going back home to bed.  Very cute, and one of the parents checked it out after storytime!

New Picture Book: Just In Case, by Yuyi Morales

Just in time for Dia!

A sequel of sorts to Just a Minute, which I actually prefer.

Just in Case
Yuyi Morales
ISBN:9781596433298
Read Oct. 20, 2014

Senor Calavera is once again heading to Grandma Beetle's birthday party, and the ghost Zelmiro is helping him choose a last-minute gift (he forgot that gifts were customary).  Calavera works his way through the alphabet picking sometimes very good gifts (instrucciones "to find all things lost"), sometimes less good ("un kilo" is actually just that - a just-over-two-pounds weight), and sometimes just peculiar (Niebla; fog, and W; because two Vs are just not going to cut it) until he gets to Y, and he's done.  Surely Grandma will like something, and besides, he's running late for the party now!  He hurries on his bicycle but crashes and falls, and now he needs just one more present, perhaps something starting with Z...

It's cute, but the alphabet bits make it difficult for storytime.  I do Halloween/Dia only once a year (sadly) so I should be fine sticking with the original.

Storytelling: The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, Linda Williams & Megan Lloyd

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
Linda Williams, illustrated by Megan Lloyd
ISBN: 9780690045840
First told Fall 1996, purchased for storytelling resource Sept 2014.

This is an excellent example of a storytelling-friendly picture book.  It's prime content for Halloween, which is one of our few remaining "tale-telling" holidays.  It's got a repetitive and building climax inside a simple framework story, allowing easy expansion or contraction depending on the audience.  It's got a somewhat scary feel to it, with a sweet homey twist payoff at the end.  It's not too juvenile or pandering to distance adults, and it's not too scary or "adult" to confuse children.

I still remember most of it, and if I had to give a storytelling performance on pain of death, this is the one I'd pull out.

With Halloween approaching, and me getting back into storytelling, I wanted to re-visit my first foray into performance arts.


Summary:
A little old lady lives alone, and needs to fetch edibles from the forest.  She's heading home along the path when she encounters various articles of clothing, from shoes to pants to shirt to gloves (each with a distinctive sound or movement "Clomp Clomp" for the shoes, "wiggle wiggle" for the gloves) culminating in a giant pumpkin head that says BOO!  She startles and runs back to the house, and once safely at home, her natural bravery reasserts itself, and she stands up to the now-assembled creature and puts it straight, assigning it a job in the garden as a scarecrow since it likes scaring people so much.