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.

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!