Halloween Picture Books To Die For

Night of the Pumpkinheads 

Michael J. Rosen, Hugh McMahon illus. 2011

The concept of a picture book illustrated with totally over-the-top-awesome pumpkin carvings is incredible. Brilliant, actually. The story, while fairly simple, has a full and satisfying arc. The pumpkins want to dress up and scare the children, but the children laugh. The vegetables, on the other hand... Well, what kid isn't afraid of vegetables?!? There are also some parent-friendly puns and jokes (mimes really are scary!), but the text itself is straightforward, with almost textbook clarity. It's a smart book, an incredibly creative book, a "why didn't I think of that" book. But the execution taught me a few things.

For one, I happen to love frivolity and play in the language. Picture books are like poetry: every word counts, every word should do multiple things (evoke, set tone, move the story, establish character). Relying on concept and (obtuse-to-a-child) humor just doesn't sparkle. I also longed for more "setting" to the pumpkin-carved illustrations. Of course I'm not an illustrator or a pumpkin carver, but I am a photographer. Why not set up whole scenes instead of the chalk background? While the text was supremely easy to read (if a bit verbose), the pictures were hard to read.

P.s. Why is October muggy - warm and moist? Wouldn't it be chilly? Windy? Stormy? Words matter.

That said, the carvings are really truly amazing, and the story is satisfying, clever, funny, especially for adults.

Trick or Treat

Leo Landry 2012

First, I love the size of this book. The smaller, square size is so bedtime-friendly, and the amount of text per page is perfect for an evening read-aloud. I hate when Rowdy is trying to flip pages ahead of my reading, and she didn't need to do that here. (I also hate wordless pages where I, in my pre-bedtime-zombie state have to make sh@t up on the spot.) I also love the simple story of a little ghost having a Halloween party, and clear illustrations with a bit of visual irony. One invitation ends up in human hands! Oh my! The ending is satisfying.

Here's an example of text and illustrations that meld perfectly. Both are streamlined, simple. The text isn't showy, nor overly complex. It tells the story in a sweet, gentle way, which matches the sweet, gentle illustrations and completes a story about Scary things (Like a ghost named Oliver!) that turn out to be sweet and gentle! Talk about aboutness - this book does it beautifully.

Monster Mash

David Catrow illus. 2012

The song, Monster Mash, in picture book form. Hmmm. I'm not sure how well the song translates into an actual story. Because, well, it's not a story. It's a song. So the plot would be: monsters come to a party and do the monster mash. Which is, well, not much, but hey, it's about the illustrations, baby!

Which are ... gross. I mean, they're amazingly artistic and creative and colorful and almost sort of disney or pixar or something (which, if you look at the artist's bio, makes sense). But the creatures are scary. And gross. And this is coming from someone who keeps a collection of Garbage Pail Kids Funkos on her desk. When I asked Rowdy if she like the book she said, "Yeah." So I asked, "Are the pictures scary?" "Naw, it has Spooky Scary Skeletons!" So, bah, whatever. I would have liked the book more had the illustrations pushed for more of a story, gone beyond the Monster Mash song.

Only a Witch Can Fly

Alison McGhee, Taeeun Yoo illus. 2009

This book has definite kid appeal, proven by 10-yr-old Mud Pie's theft of it. She's read it several times already so it must speak to her. And no wonder! The writing has a Charlotte Zolotow feel to it. Lyrical, poetic.

From the mouth of Mud Pie, "I liked the kitty, but I didn't like that I couldn't tell if the person on the broom was a girl or a boy." So there, publishing industry, quit trying to make characters gender-ambiauious. It's creepy. Though a Halloween book is supposed to be creepy, so... Never mind!

The Monsterator

Keith Graves 2014

Illustrations: adorable, scary without being grotesque, and the flip-book monster-maker at the back is brilliant! It's a book, it's a toy, it's a full fifteen minutes of entertainment on a long car ride! The story: child-centric (good), clever (good), surprising (gooder!). Spoiler alert: I sort of love that the little monster didn't "learn himself a lesson and be a good boy ever after." Because you know, sometimes if you make a nasty face long enough, it really does stay that way. The rhyme: worked as well as it needed to.

Happy Halloween Witch's cat!

Harriet Muncaster 2015

Surprisingly this take off on the "Is that my Tractor" sort of book was our absolute favorite. Rowdy asked for it many times, and Pie and I spent quite a while studying the pictures and exclaiming over little details we spotted. We love love love love loved (we really loved) the illustrations. We loved the simple storyline that, though the illustrations, wrapped up surprisingly well (all the discarded costumes show up at the party anyway!). Adorable, creative. One I wouldn't mind adding to my permanent collection.

Black and Bittern was Night

Robert Heidbreder, John Martz 2013

Here I'm going to be grumpy. I really really loved this book. I love the playful language, the illustrations that pop with simplicity. I never got to read it all the way through. Why? My tongue hurt. Seriously. Reading it aloud just wasn't happening, and Rowdly got too impatient with the thrickle thrackling skul-a-mug-mugging to let me work it out. As a performance piece it might be amazing. As a bedtime read-aloud? Splickderringdoo.

Picture Book Round-Up: Three Fun Books

Thanks to recent developments, I love love love the library again. (Although I still prefer bookstores - they're less expensive!) The books I pulled off the New Picture Books section today: Yard Sale by Eve Bunting (love her!), illustrated by Lauren Castillo, Are We There Yeti? by Ashlyn Anstee, and Flowers Are Calling by Rita Gray, illustrated by Kenard Pak. Now for my writerly thoughts (pics take you to amazon links, affiliate style).

Yard Sale (Bunting/Castillo, 2015): Firstly, the touch of the book: I absolutely love it. I'm extremely tactile, have been known to go to Joann just to run my hands through the fabrics, so when I come across a book with feel-good pages I'm very very happy. The paper is heavy, matte, pleasureful to touch and turn. Paper combined with the deceptively simple illustrations lend the book a retro 1980s feel. Which really matches the story, because the economy in the 80s was rotten, and life was just kinda depressing (for my family, anyhow). The illustrations perfectly blend with the mood Bunting creates, but don't make the story melodramatic or caricatured, if that makes sense.

The story itself is beautiful, the writing straightforward, the aboutness clear and moving. For those studying picture books, this would be a good one to re-type, storyboard and dissect.

Flowers Are Calling (Gray/Pak, 2015): Those same fabulous matte pages which are essential for the absolute drop dead gorgeousness of these illustrations. The illustrations are really truly glorious. I wanted to frame them and hang them all over my house! Now, may I confess something? I didn't understand the text until I read the jacket copy (which I read precisely because I didn't understand the text). I may very well be that slow, but as I read I kept thinking, Why aren't the flowers calling the porcupine? Is he hidden in the picture? No, he's not, so why... Apparently Rowdy thought the same, because somewhere around the moose she wiggled off my lap and wandered off to play. She may be (at 3.5) on the young side for this book. However, this is one I'll use with my older children when we talk about plants/pollination later this school year. Rarely do education and beauty meld into such a perfect harmony.

Are We There Yeti? (Anstee, 2015): Another one with a great feel to the pages. Yay! I'll admit, I was skeptical of this book because I wasn't sure Rowdy would "get" the pun. But she totally did and spent the rest of the day saying, "Are we there YETI?" and laughing like a maniac. How awesome is that? I think she loved the pictures too, and the mystery (what's in the cave? oooh more yetis!!!), and the kids being impatient on the bus.

This is a great book to study suspense, how a picture book needs to build it up then resolve it in a satisfying way (this one does both exceptionally well).

With the BFG Movie Coming and All

In honor of a very special day, I thought I'd revive this old post about a book I found, um, intriguing, with some interesting asides (see below!).

My first thought as I read this book was Wow! Dahl is on LSD! Which makes sense for a book published in the 80s (is Dahl a child of the 60s/70s?). But no, he wasn't on psychotropic drugs. The book is Freud and Jung with a dash of Platonic forms. That says it all, doesn't it?

Ok, on to at least one real thought: BFG’s fabulous voice of made-up words, rhythm and bizarre syntax that never muddles meaning makes the book vivid and real, and surprisingly easy to read. Logic, however, seems a non-essential factor in this book, and in fantasy for this age in general. Example: the BFG can’t understand the natterbox spiders (he doesn’t know the language), but he can understand the chatbag cattypiddlers. Um. Why? Not that I really care because, hello, natterbox spiders and chatbag cattypiddlers are just too freaking awesome.

Yet I can’t get away from a Freudian reading of this book. Case in point, the giants have these frankfurter lips, right? And we all know what hot dogs represent... And they have this slimy drool, and little Sophie ends up in a giant cucumber-like (phallic much?) vegetable and is then taken into the giant’s mouth ... Yes, yes, I know. A stretch. It’s just creepy to me, like the author is subconsciously working through some latent memories he can't make sense of. Anyway, enough of that. Now for additional disjointed and seemingly random thoughts:

I love how the BFG is so childlike while the giants are rather obviously bullies, though the “message” is a little too heavy-handed for me, and a wee wittle one-sided. There's a line about human beans (yes, beans) being the only ones that kill their own kind, which isn’t true at all. I had enough hamsters as a child to know they often kill one another, and they eat their young (or in the case of Peaches, half of one of her young. The other half she left for me to find). On that note, I was a little annoyed by the social commentary. It seems the book was half parody (jack and the beanstalk references), half fantasy, and half cultural critique (yes, I know my halves don’t add up). Yet even with all the talk of how human beans kill one another, the giants (only doing what comes naturally to themselves, unlike the awful humans) get a pretty severe punishment. 

Moving on: Stephen King wrote somewhere that horror is having people react in expected ways to unexpected events. Here a giant meets real England and a table is made for him of grandfather clocks and a ping pong table. Dahl gives great authenticating details of the butler needing a ladder to set the table, it taking four footmen to carry the clocks, and so on. Such great humor here, and the fart jokes, and by the bellypoppers and portedos. I’m laughing aloud. In public. People are looking at me. 

On the downside, it took to page 118 (Sophie trying to save the school kids) for there to be strong forward motion. The plot was muddled throughout and not tied up too neatly at the end. Maybe because the whole thing is just some Jungian shared dream? It was all Dahl’s dream, obviously, since he is the BFG who, we discover at the end, is writing the story. Obviously, right? RIGHT? 

So although I found the book creepily Freudian/Jungian, and although I did enjoy the wild creativity and fun use of language, I do hope Dahl got himself some good psychotherapy. 

As an aside, I loved the bit about why there are blank pages at the back of an atlas—to draw the places no one has ever been. Isn’t that a metaphor for writing? And for life itself? 

A second aside: Dahl and I share a birthday! Which just so happens to be TODAY! Happy birthday to us!

Third aside: affiliate link up there, yo. 

Abundance, Gratitude, Life as Gift

This year has not been easy.

Every moment is packed with more than I can do (school! meals! chauffeur! high schooler! baby! toddler! writing!). Every corner of our home is packed and used for multiple purposes (kitchen: food prep, mail station, delivery center. Dining room: food consumption, school, craft table, office, clothes folding. Living room: morning coffee, office, baby play wonderland, kids' computer center. Family room: entertainment, school work area, partial library, preschool supplies, music and art. etc.). Every corner of my mind is packed with things I desperately don't want to forget. From order forms to rare quiet moments snuggling our newest bit of abundance.

Rather than seeing life as overwhelming, draining, exhausting, I'm striving to see the fullness of every corner as abundance. Life is gift. These children are gift. And today we celebrate our newest, smallest gift. I realized in writing this that today is my first time mentioning him here. I'm not sure how a year slipped by, but it has, and I will remedy that now by unveiling his journal nickname (since all my babies have nicknames). He is and will forever be: Awesomesauce.

And what an awesome year it has been. Little Awesomesauce has been the true Tagalong Baby, going with us to Kentucky and Pittsburgh and Milwaukee and New York City. I was nursing him when my agent called with news of my first book contract and he helped inspire my second book. Yet despite clutching to every moment in an attempt to preserve it forever, an entire year has passed. I'm not sure where it went. But a few of those places:

Brand new and already smiling

Hotel Poolside in Pittsburgh!

Playing Hide-n-Seek?

At MOMA in NYC!

Another museum!

And a castle!

 Happy birthday, my darling, always-smiling boy. You are the sauce that makes everything awesome.

The awesomest sauce of all

A New Old Regular Everyday Thing

In this house we read a lot, especially picture books. I'm sure it has nothing to do with having a three-year-old and a sweet little baby. So trips to the library (Penny's favorite place ever) always end with stacks upon stacks of picture books. Usually I have to sneak some back on the shelf because our book bag will be overflowing. I'm not sure when the library added a New Books section for picture books, but the discovery has yielded a happy preschooler. More books! While I get to keep up with new titles.

I'm also trying to Read like a Writer, and since picture books are too easy to read carelessly and cast aside, especially when a certain tot often loses patience with a book after the first few pages, I'm going to record books as I read them and share my (I'm sure brilliantly insightful) thoughts here. Starting with...

Jampires! 

Sarah McIntyre/David O'Connell, 2014

Can I just say I love love love weird books like this? The illustrations are zany, frolicking, fun (not to mention delicious), and the story is surprisingly satisfying for a picture book.

I hate writing, "for a picture book," because picture books should have stories. You know, with beginnings and middles and endings. The really great ones do. Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are. But too often it seems picture books are given a pass. Anyhow, I'll rant about that another day. Right now I'll comment on the elements of Big People Books that this picture book shares, that make it good.

1. A sympathetic protagonist. Sam is cute as a button, has personality, and shows efficacy - he solves the problem and rescues the world from jamlessness!

2. A plot. I feared, especially when I saw the rhyme, that the book would be a sing-song little story about creatures who eat jam. And while it is about Jampires, it's mostly about Sam saving his donuts and returning the little lost Jampires to their home (the latter was the one element I thought could have been developed more. But hey, we're talking about a few hundred words so...).

3. A really awesome setting. The Jampire's world is so, so, so YUMMY! I want to live there, like right now, with my afternoon coffee. Honestly, I can see a movie springing from this book. If it did, I'd be first in line to see it.

So that's that. I could go on about rhyme (pretty good), and the use of color to evoke mood in the illustrations (really lovely), but maybe next time. I'll just say, I want a Jampire of my own. I also love the word Dodgers.

What Publishing Will Do For You

Dr. Who fans come in all ages!

In Bird by Bird Anne Lamott describes publishing as the golden eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar, and she writes, "Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy."

I agree. If anyone thinks that a magical first contract will ... pay off their mortgage, repair their marriage, get their kids to obey, fill them with endless joy, make writing easy, well, it won't. I don't feel much different today than I did six months ago. My house is still messy, my kids still draw all over themselves with Sharpie during nap, writing is still hard. Really, really hard.

In some ways writing is harder. My agent expects things from me. Like books. Good books! Finished books! I give myself arbitrary and unyielding deadlines because the pressure is on, baby. I question every word I put to the page because, ach, I only studied picture books one semester, how can I be a picture book author? I have the unshakable and very rational fear that the editors who bought my books were just playin' and any day now will notify me that they changed their minds and could they have the advance money back please. Security? Confidence? My pen scribbling off one blissfully perfect story after another? Nope, publishing did none of that.

But these first contracts did do something. Something surprising.

To find out what, check here!

Internet Troll Strikes Again

Well, they did it again. That whoever-with-too-much-time-needs-a-day-job troll who swiped my original blogspot sub domain has added more content. And, as before, the content is mine, taken from the ever useful internet archive. Shown here:

I love the Wayback Machine!

Seriously, that hair.

That's me, when I first started blogging all those eons ago. I had only three children then, and short hair! I remember designing the key graphic from photos I found on Flickr (Creative Commons, of course) and spending hours and hours and hours staring at lines of code, deciphering it like an archeologist studying a stone tablet. I was so proud of that little blog. And it served me well. I got my first editorial contact through it (hi Mick!) and developed a following - in a genre I no longer write in, but that's beside the point. It seems my old, defunct posts have been resurrected by this, this *spit* hacker.

One post stolen still lives on my current blog: this one. Who knows, maybe I'll bring back the others just for kicks.

The thing I don't understand is why? A few posts link to weird little websites, and the same weird websites (from the same IP address, interestingly) are linked in the sidebar. I'd assumed the thief was using my content to drive traffic to real businesses, that actually sell something, thus earning, like, you know, real money? Because hello, trolling the internet archive for posts from 2006 on some random mother-of-now-five's old blog and copy/pasting them to one's own hijacked site is really time consuming. And if you're not making money from it, then why do it? To troll me? Because s/he is bored? Incapable of writing his/her own posts? Mentally ill? All of the above?

Maybe I should be flattered. I mean I know I'm a Totally Awesome writer and everything, but maybe I'm awesomer than I thought. Maybe I'm so amazingly brilliant this Ukranian-Panamanian-MN-dweller just couldn't help himself from, uh, helping himself to my words. That must be it. Right? I mean, I'd steal this. Totally.

Click to enlarge and read the posts. Or, maybe not.

Because I know between nursing the baby and searching for another child's lost wallet, and responding to emails from my editors and driving my teenager to orientation and trying to get my toddler to please god just poop already, I really have time to be emailing my lawyer friend. So to this emorphous Whoever (Whomever?): take my intellectual property off your site. Please.

On the upside, the nostalgia of browsing the Wayback Machine is just. So. Amazing. Like this:

Did I mention I love the Wayback Machine?