Happy Halloween

Oh boy, Halloween is here again! Do you remember planning your costume and going door to door with your friends? How much candy you got! Since my mother decided we got too much candy, she told us we could come back half way through our rounds of our small town and leave what we’d collected so our sacks wouldn’t get too heavy. Innocents that we were, we’d come back and unload. Mother, of course, would give out that candy to kids visiting our house. We never missed the candy. This was back in the 1950s when it was safe to accept homemade goodies. Perhaps it still is, but we’ve lost our faith in each other’s goodness.

The boys in our town, when they got too old to dress up and collect candy would make mischievous instead. A favorite was to see who could ring the town hall bell without getting caught.

My husband and his friends, being farm boys, one time dismantled a neighbor’s hay wagon and reassembled it on his roof. Strangely enough they didn’t wake him up. Of course the neighbor did discover the culprits who then had to take the wagon off the roof.

Still, most of us learned our lessons and survived our brashness to become useful members of society.

(- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -)

Of course if it’s a Kate DiCamillo book it’s going to be good. This one is quite amusing.

Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon

Kate DiCamillo

Illustrated by Chris Van Dusen

Francine Poulet comes from a long line of animal control officers. The forty-seven awards she’s won prove how good she is at her job. She knows no fear whether confronting a bear or a mouse. When she gets a call about a “ghost” raccoon, with great confidence she sets out to round the critter up. Alas Francine meets her match! The raccoon screams her name. Not her usual name, Francine, but the pet name her father called her, Franny. How does that coon know her seldom-used nickname? At first Francine doesn’t realize she feels fear thumping in her heart. But when she does recognize fear, she is mortified. She grabs the raccoon, slips on her ladder and plummets three stories down to the ground and wakes up in the hospital with a broken arm and a broken leg. Eventually she recovers, promptly quits her animal control officer job and takes a job as a cashier at a bait and tackle store. One day a boy named Frank and his sister Stella come in looking for sweets to buy. Well, any knowledgeable person knows a store named Clyde’s Bait, Feed, Tackle and Animal Necessities doesn’t carry sweets, but Stella wants to be sure. Frank recognizes Francine and encourages her to get her courage back by capturing the raccoon. Ms. DiCamillo’s writing is always full of wry humor which inspires illustrators to go for the funny. This is Volume 2 of the “Tales from Deckawoo Drive.”

BIBLIO: 2015, Candlewick Press, Ages 6 to 9, $12.99.

REVIEWER: Sarah Maury Swan

FORMAT: Chapter Book

ISBN: 978-0-7636-6886-0

(- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -)

Did you ever carve a pumpkin? Or draw a scary face on one? It takes a while, but that’s what happens to this pumpkin.

Little Boo

Stephen Wunderli

Illustrated by Tim Zeltner

A seed wants to be scary, but when he says Boo to a falling leaf, the leaf tells him he’s not scary at all. A grub is too busy to pay attention to the seed and when the snow flakes silently settle around him, they ask why the many of them should be afraid of the one of him. The wind comforts him, telling him to be patient, and covers him with soil to keep him warm. So Little Boo sleeps through the winter dreaming of saying Boo. Finally, the air and soil warm up and the seed sends up green shoots to feel the warmth. As he grows, he tries to scare an old boot and then a shovel and finally a watering can, but they all ignore him. So the sprout keeps growing and the wind encourages him, though the water bucket, the bees and the grasshopper blink not an eye when our growing sprout says boo. The not so little sprout grows floppy orange flowers which turn into fruit. The fruit all start small and green, but one swells much bigger than the others and is picked by hands which carry Little Boo into a house where the once seed becomes a jack o’lantern. Then his BOO is big enough to scare the cat and the ghosts and goblins. This is a nicely told story about waiting for your dreams to come true and it’s a clever way to introduce children to the cycle of life for plants.

BIBLIO: 2014, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, Ages 3 to 6, $16.99.

REVIEWER: Sarah Maury Swan

FORMAT: Picture Book

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9708-5

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9709-2

(- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -)

I’m a firm believer in ghosts having felt them around me. “Yeah, sure Sarah,” you say with a snort and snigger. It’s true. Last winter I was in an old building that is now a restaurant, waiting for the rest of our group to join me and my friend. The door to the room was on my left and the windows looking over the street were to my right. My friend was sitting at right angles to me so she could see behind me. I felt a man come in through the doorway, walk behind me—the sound of his hurrying foot steps thumping in my ears—and then I saw him walk to the windows, do something and then head back out the door. He had on dark trousers and a yellow plaid vest. After he was gone, I asked my friend if a man had just been in the room. With a frown on her face, she said, “No, it’s only the two of us.” When I told our waiter what I’d seen, he said, “Oh yes, we have several ghosts.”

The Unsolved Mystery of Haunted Houses

Katherine Krohn

Are the noises and electrical glitches in old houses caused by ghosts? The little boy who fell down the well two hundred years ago wants to get out? The murdered grandfather who left his wealth to a library seeks revenge on his heirs? Maybe the old woman whose only happiness was as a small child living in the house? Or could it be the house is just old and its bones creak the way an old person’s do? Or perhaps the electrical system needs updating? The author touches very briefly on such phenomena and also points out that not all “haunted” houses are old. One of the old ones—old for the United States—is the President’s home, the White House in Washington, DC. Ghost and haunted houses have been a topic of conversation for centuries. The ones mentioned in this book are the Edinburgh Castle in Scotland and the Borley Rectory in England. There are actually people who, with many gadgets like thermometers and tape recorders, research instances of haunting. Most of the time the researchers find natural causes such as the inherent creakiness of a house contracting in the winter. The book has a number of interesting facts, but the “True or False?” sidebars are confusing in many instances. The introduction of vocabulary words is done nicely and the book makes for a fun Halloween discussion of scary things.

BIBLIO: 2014, Capstone Press/Capstone, Ages 6 to 8, $24.65.

REVIEWER: Sarah Maury Swan

FORMAT: Chapter Book

ISBN: 978-1-4765-3097-0

ISBN: 978-1-4765-3428-2

ISBN: 978-1-4765-3442-8

(- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -) (- -)

Happy Halloween to you all and don’t eat too much candy.

The next day, November 1^st, which some people call “All Saints Day,” was my brother Bill’s birthday and, being the obnoxious younger sister, I would always say he should have been born the day before because he was most decidedly not a saint.