HALLOWEEN IS...

This remake of Halloween (1984) brightens the original’s gloomy tone with larger, redrawn illustrations featuring lots of happy-looking children and the occasional, not-particularly-scary, witch or ghost, paired to such reassuring lines as “today [skeletons] are used to scare people and have fun,” and “weird and scary stories are enjoyed by all.” Rewriting the text and adding some detail, Gibbons fills in the holiday’s past, but focuses most closely on how it is celebrated today, adding warnings (not in the previous edition) that pumpkin-carving and trick-or-treating should only be done with parental assistance. Though this holiday standard has never gone out of print, there is enough new and recast material here to make it a treat, rather than a trick, even for libraries that just bought fresh copies of the old edition. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-8)