Remember when you tried to think of the perfect Halloween costume? This perennial question of the holiday is on everyone’s mind, but no one is more concerned with it than third-grader Gordie. He does not want to go as a ghost again. His friends try to help him. Lamont even volunteers his creative mother as a helper. After all, Lamont will wear a giant box and go as a breakfast table. His mom even saved a big box for Gordie—a box of toilet paper! The whole bus is laughing, and Gordie hastily brags to the bus bully that he will dress as something scary. To complicate his problem, he has volunteered to hold the hand of a first grader who is so afraid of costumes that he vomits when he sees a scary one. So, what to do? In the end, things work out for everyone and the annual Halloween parade goes off without a hitch. This is a universal, if predictable, story of the dramas that surround the choosing of Halloween costumes and the nervousness and social pressure surrounding elementary-school costume parades. Clear, large typeface, generous white space around text, and sweet occasional pencil sketches make this attractive to the early reader. Though the basic plot is uncomplicated, many extraneous classmates muddle the simplicity. For fans of Cam Jansen and the Boxcar Children. (Fiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-8234-1652-6
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miranda’s book counts the monsters gathering at a birthday party, while a simple rhyming text keeps the tally and surveys the action: “Seven starved monsters are licking the dishes./Eight blow out candles and make birthday wishes.” The counting proceeds to ten, then by tens to fifty, then gradually returns to one, which makes the monster’s mother, a purple pin-headed octopus, very happy. The book is surprisingly effective due to Powell’s artwork; the color has texture and density, as if it were poured onto the page, but the real attention-getter is the singularity of every monster attendee. They are highly individual and, therefore, eminently countable. As the numbers start crawling upward, it is both fun and a challenge to try to recognize monsters who have appeared in previous pages, or to attempt to stay focused when counting the swirling or bunched creatures. The story has glints of humor, and in combination with the illustrations is a grand addition to the counting shelf. (Picture book. 3-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201835-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
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