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4 Stars
Into the Pumpkin
Kinda Franklin
Schiffer Publishing
No. Pages: 48 Ages: 4 to 11

It’s Halloween Party time again and the witches, bats, ghouls, ghosts, black cats, scarecrows, ravens, and spiders have come together for the annual bash. Questions remain. Where should they have the party, in the graveyard or the pumpkin patch? Will they dress up or go as themselves? Take a ride on a witches broom to find the answers to this year’s Halloween party.

You will hop on the witch’s broom for a journey like no other. Each creature of the night has a part to play. The bats are letting all know about the party, the ghouls are planning the treat or treating. The witch mails out invitations. Is she not a little bit late, or does she have magic on her side? Everyone has a job to do, right down to the scarecrow, who is the host of the night’s ball.

The biggest question, it seems, is where to hold the party. In the graveyard, the haunted castle, or the pumpkin patch. I like the haunted castle. It has great character standing amidst the ghosts. The graveyard is the spookiest and the pumpkin patch says nothing about the Great Pumpkin, so for me, it must happen at the haunted castle. Once the party is over, and the raven has sung all he came to sing, the witch sends us back home by way of the pumpkin patch. It is quite a journey on this Halloween night.

Told in rhyming verse, the Halloween party plans are whimsical. There is nothing here to scare a little one. The illustrations have a ghoulish, haunted feel, yet are bright and fun. It is the illustrations that make this book for me. I like the orange cast of Halloween and the feel of spider webs and wisps of clouds covering each illustration. This lends a feeling of motion and emotion to each picture.  All the fall colors of Halloween are there. The oranges, yellows, whites, browns, and especially the blacks come together in delightful ways. The ghosts are dancing in a circle and I can hear the music as they twirl.

The text is a poem broken down verse by verse on the pages and illustrated by the author. She has made an unusual book with a familiar theme. Most of the lines roll right off the tongue in the lyrical way I enjoy. I think the illustrations are what make this book a winner. Anyone who enjoys Halloween will delight in Into the Pumpkin. I see this book as a family favorite, visited each year alongside the Great Pumpkin and treat or treating.

Into the Pumpkin is party planning that will not frighten a soul. To those of you who collect picture books for the fantastic illustrations, this is a must have. The illustrations are wonderfully enchanting. Into the Pumpkin could have just as easily have been dark, ghoulish, and frightening; the thing nightmares are made out of. Ms. Franklin chose to go the opposite direction and made a story any child can enjoy at any age. Into the Pumpkin is a Halloween winner.

Into the Pumpkin

Author/Illustrator: Linda Franklin   website
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing   website
Release Date: July 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7643-4183-0
Number of Pages: 48
Grades: Pre-K to 6
Ages: 4 to 11
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     Boo to you, fellow authors, on this day that salutes the scary, weird and (if you have kids) the post trick-or-treat-candy-sugar-rush.  I am probably the least qualified person to write this post, because I am not a fan of the weird, scary and (and I really don't need the candy.)

    However, there is one Halloween-associated icon that I enjoy. In fact, I find them inspirational (hence the awful punned post title, which I hope you will not take literally.)

    I love cemetaries.  Graveyards.  Tombstone towns.

    When I was a seven or eight, my teenage cousin, was told to "entertain" me.  She didn't want to entertain me; she wanted to see her boyfriend.  So she decided to use a little revulsion therapy.  She told me she was taking me to one of her favorite places.  I adored my cousin, and would have followed her anywhere. Her "favorite place" turned out to be the town cemetary, two blocks away.  If her plan had been to scare me into going home, she failed miserably.

    I fell in love with cemetaries.  That day is still one of my favorite memories of my cousin and me. (And yes, she really did, and still does, love cemetaries)

    Why would a seven-year-old like a cemetary?

     This was an old-fashioned cemetary, with a mix of tombstones, funeral statuary and mausoleums. Thanks to a mother who was phobic about funerals, I had never attended one, or been any closer to a cemetary than the back seat of the car as we passed one on the road.  So this was what happened to people's bodies after they were dead! (My Sunday School teacher had told us what happened to their souls, but was not inclined to dwell on what happened to their physical bodies.)

     What drew me was not so much the ghoulish aspect ("I am standing on dead people") but the memorial markers themselves. In the older sections, the polished granite, worn marble, moss-covered
crosses, tablets, angels, and lambs each told the story of a life, if you took the time to think about it.  Even back then I was fascinated by real stories about real people. Just reading the old- fashioned names--Narcissa, Hiram, Magda, Josiah---brought these people to life in my seven-year-old imagination.  Sunbonnets, long beards, mothers, farmers. Some of this didn't take a great deal of imagination since often the many children the mother had born were buried along side her, their names simply added to the list on her obelisk.

     I peeked in the grated doors of the mausoleums and wondered about people who were so rich and important they could rest in their own tiny marble house after they were dead. I especially wondered about the ones that had windows (who was looking at what?) But mostly I wondered about their stories.


   That first cemetary was in a tiny farming town in southern Illinois, a town in which my teenage cousin had lived most of her life. She could tell me the stories of most of these people, or at least of their present day ancestors.  To me, the child of a father who was transferred seemingly every other year, the idea that you not only were acquainted with you neighbors, but that they had stories. . . this was simply beyond comprehension. I remember going home from that graveyard (which I remember as being at the edge of the town, surrounded by corn fields) and scribbling down everything my cousin had told me, plus a few things she hadn't....my mind had taken that first plunge from fact to fiction.

   I was hooked.

     I have visited a lot of graveyards since then.  On a high school trip to Paris, a bunch of us traipsed around Pere Lachaise, looking not for Oscar Wilde or Moliere, but the then recently-deceased Jim Morrison's grafitti-and-beer-bottle-covered resting

Man, this a lot of books for one set of reviews... I didn't think it had been that long, but its been 27 days since the last one... Odds are I missed a book at some point.THE SPELL OF THE SORCERER'S SKULLJOHN BELLAIRS1984, 170 PAGESA classic. This is probably one of my favorite Bellairs, has some fun images and great ideas, topped off by Gorey art - What's better, I ask? Hooray to my friend

We begin with a murder. A triple murder, in fact. The man Jack was trying for a fourth, but the little baby had a habit of wandering, and he had left his crib, bumped down the stairs, and gone out into the night.

Jack wasn't worried, however. He knew that his keen sense of smell would lead him to the child. He ends up at the graveyard, and he knows that the child is there. What he doesn't know is that after a visit from his newly dead mother, the baby has been taken in by some "residents" of the graveyard, and that he is being protected by a "man" named Silas. Jack is sent off.

The child, named Nobody Owens, exists in the graveyard with ghostly teachers and friends, exploring and learning while knowing that Jack is out there, and is still out for him.

Gaiman has brought a wonderful story in the vein of Coraline. Superbly creepy, outright scary, yet sweet and filled with melancholy. I simply cannot wait to see Dave McKean's art added to the mix for the final copy. Also head on over here for additional information and some incredible illustrations.