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Book Reviews
Trick-or-Treat: A Happy Haunter’s Halloween
Leppanen and Carpenter’s book is vividly colored and only sort-of-scary in a way that will seem familiar from TV cartoons and “Monsters Inc.”: grinning acid-green witches fly through purple skies; skeletons play Ping-Pong; and a mummy-mommy, wrapped in grave cloths, packs spider eggs for her mummy-son’s school lunch. The poems are printed in large, easy-to-read type, and vary in length from four to 16 lines. There’s “Squeaky Clean,” a limerick that doesn’t quite scan, about a ghost who disappears in the bath, and “Dinner for One,” about monsters who eat everything:
I eat grown-ups
by the bunch.
I ate six
today at lunch.
I’m a ghoul,
that’s what I do.
Don’t ask me home
or I’ll eat you!
The collection, which contains fifteen poems, ends on a comforting note: a child thinks of all the spooky things abroad on Halloween night and concludes, “But from the covers / I poke my head. / They won’t get me. / I’m safe in bed!” “Trick-or-Treat” is fun to read aloud but accessible and appropriate for the youngest readers in the family; spooky enough to whet their appetites for the eve, but not so frightening they’ll hide in the closet when the doorbell starts ringing.
Plenty of spooky rhyming books about the pumpkin season already exist, but Leppanen can sling around Halloween iconography with the best of them. Fifteen double-page spreads employ a variety of settings—including trick-or-treating scenarios, Halloween parties, and, especially, bedtime scenes—and toss in everything from ping-ponging skeletons to mop-riding witches, tentacled closet monsters, and bathing ghosts. Though some poems stretch out for several stanzas, the best are the short, blunt ones: “I raffled my hat. / Whoever did win it / got something extra— / my head was still in it.” Carpenter’s angular digital art has a Molly Bang–style boldness and uses bright primary colors to contrast the various ghoulies against (mostly) dark and brooding backgrounds. The ominous undertones of some of the poems are lightened by the art’s humorous details. Got an event involving a huddle of nervously giggling kids and a flashlight beneath the reader’s chin? Here’s your book.
K-Gr3 – Fifteen spooky poems, each with its own spread, celebrate Halloween as youngsters in costume share the night with a variety of ghosts, goblins, and unknown fiends. Bright neon colors contrast smartly with dark, brooding backgrounds as skeletons enjoy a cookout in the graveyard and Frankenstein goes trick-or-treating. A sliver of moon and a sprinkling of stars light the dark as, “Witches on broomsticks/fly over treetops./Except when it rains,/then they use mops.” One verse extols the pleasures of a mummy mommy: “She reads my favorite horror story/and makes up extra parts-real gory.” Another lists reasons that a vampire makes a wonderful daddy: “You can fly with him in the full moonlight./When someone picks on you, he’ll bite!” Young readers will identify with the children searching for monsters under the bed and the source of strange noises at bedtime. They will also be reassured by the final verse, “Happy Haunter,” featuring a smiling girl tucked into bed, safe from the creatures carousing outside on the rooftops. This collection of funny-scary verses is sure to delight even the faint of heart.
Fifteen short and often silly poems introduce Halloween monsters and spooks that ham it up in Carpenter’s in-your-face digital cartoons. An enormous pink monster devours everything in sight, including the words of its poem, which appear inside his gaping mouth: “I eat spiders./ I eat slugs./ I eat any/ kind of bugs./ I eat cats/ and doggies too./ I eat rats/ (they’re fun to chew).” A creepier entry portrays a girl’s dark night of the soul after reading the names on tombstones: “I’ve read them all and now I’m done./ I’ve seen my name on every one.” A gently ghoulish collection of Halloween poems to provoke both giggles and chills.
The Horn Book
These Halloween-y poems told from shifting perspectives—the scared trick-or-treating youngsters’ and the creepy monsters’—are great for both the expert cadence (they sound smashing aloud) and also the balance of tone. Some are mildly chilling: “I’m a ghoul, / that’s what I do. / Don’t ask me home / or I’ll eat you!” Others are humorous: “Can anybody tell me / (if anybody knows) / why skeletons aren’t freezing / when they don’t wear any clothes?” The digital illustrations embody this mix, too: children wide-eyed with fear are greeted by benign-looking creatures just having a good time. A fun-filled, jaunty Halloween treat.
