Using a color scheme heavy on orange and black, along with plenty of glaring eyes and eerie silhouettes, McCauley creates the right atmosphere for this uneven gathering of verse. Some entries, such as “The Two-Headed Ghoul” (“It’s getting close, don’t make it mad, / Here it comes—it’s Mom and Dad!”), and a gleeful visit to a “Haunted House,” are crowd-pleasers, but there’s a moralistic streak to sentiments like, “I’d rather be kooky than spooky,” and a poem about the perils of greed titled “Sick or Treat.” Several selections are only tangentially Halloweenish (“I would like a monster pet, / The kind that children never get”), and others seem dropped into the mix haphazardly, such as one ending with “Halloween is on the way!” that would have been better placed at the beginning than midway through. Still, the collection’s perennially popular theme and evocative look should earn it a try, where budgets permit. (Poetry. 7-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7624-1552-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This longer Christmas story centers on an embroidered tapestry purchased to hang in a church for the Christmas Eve service. As with many of her works, Polacco (When Lightning Comes in a Jar, p. 665, etc.) sets her story in Michigan, this time in wintry Detroit. Young Jonathan resents his family’s recent move from Tennessee to where his minister father has been reassigned to renovate an old church and revive its congregation. Through a series of Dickensian trials and coincidences, the tapestry is purchased to cover some water damage to a church wall, and an elderly Jewish woman (and Holocaust survivor) whom the family has befriended recognizes the tapestry as the one she made in pre-WWII Germany for her wedding ceremony. In an ending worthy of O. Henry, the repairman who arrives on Christmas Eve to inspect the water damage turns out to be the woman’s long-lost husband (each thought the other had died in the Holocaust), and the devoted couple is reunited. Polacco succeeds as always with her watercolor-and-pencil illustrations in creating unique, expressive characters who seem to have real lives in their snowy city streets, cozy living rooms, and busy church. The gentle, reassuring message, suggested to Jonathan by his kindly father, is that “the universe unfolds as it should,” even when we don’t understand the pattern of the tapestry. (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-23955-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
In a snowbound Swiss village, Matti figures it’s a good day to make a gingerbread man. He and his mother mix a batch of gingerbread and tuck it in the oven, but Matti is too impatient to wait ten minutes without peeking. When he opens the door, out pops a gingerbread baby, taunting the familiar refrain, “Catch me if you can.” The brash imp races all over the village, teasing animals and tweaking the noses of the citizenry, until there is a fair crowd on his heels intent on giving him a drubbing. Always he remains just out of reach as he races over the winterscape, beautifully rendered with elegant countryside and architectural details by Brett. All the while, Matti is busy back home, building a gingerbread house to entice the nervy cookie to safe harbor. It works, too, and Matti is able to spirit the gingerbread baby away from the mob. The mischief-maker may be a brat, but the gingerbread cookie is also the agent of good cheer, and Brett allows that spirit to run free on these pages. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-23444-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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