School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-5-- This latest addition to a popular holiday series is sure to be a hit, combining a dozen-and-a-half short, shivery modern poems with some of the most deliciously ghastly illustrations children will ever see. Harry Behn establishes the spooky mood--``Tonight is the night/When dead leaves fly. . .'', and Livingston takes courageous readers past the ``jagged-tooth faces'' of jack-o'-lanterns, trick-or-treating apes, ghosts and astronauts, a ``Tink, plonk, konkle;/Midnight/Wind-chime'' skeleton, up to a magic house with ``chocolate doorknobs,/And windowpanes striped with mint'' and even into a wicked witch's kitchen--``You're in the mood for freaky food?/ You feel your taste buds itchin'. . .?'' Two-thirds of the poems appear here for the first time. Disembodied mouths, mad, disfigured faces, and leering pumpkin heads loom from the misty background in Gammell's weedy, black-and-white illustrations. Even such innocuous activities as ``Bobbing for (blub blub) for apples'' take on a sinister air--if readers make the mistake of looking too closely at the ``apples.'' Challenge hardened young horror-movie fans with this one. --John Peters, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Fiction: NF Age: 4-6 Abundant imagery for eye and ear pervade this fresh rendering of the experiences and ideas surrounding Halloween. Review, p. 784. Horn Rating: Superior, well above average. Reviewed by: mab (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In the publisher's useful series of holiday anthologies, here's a collection of 18 poems, 12 of them commissioned for this volume. More staid in tone that Bennett's Spooky Poems (see above), many of these are pleasantly descriptive: ""Apple Bobbing,"" ""Trick-or-Treating at Age Eight,"" etc. There are also touches of the imaginative (""corn on the cobweb, cauldron-hot"" in Kennedy's witch's kitchen) and the spooky (Esbensen's concert of skeletons: ""music for dancing bones!""). Spooky predominates in Gammell's b&w illustrations--his creatures are recognizably from the same hand as his joyful color work for such books as Song and Dance Man (1988 Caldecott Medal), yet also--appropriately enough for the night when the dark underside holds sway--truly frightening. Unfortunately, bits of these fine illustrations are lost in the sidesewn gutter, especially on the title spread. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
