Trick-or-Treat: A Happy Haunter's Halloween

by Debbie Leppanen, Tad Carpenter (Illustrator)

Overview

This frighteningly funny collection of Halloween poems is perfect for sharing!

It’s that time of year again…

The wind is howling,
the leaves are blowing.
A sliver of moon
is barely showing.

And the happy haunters are ready for a monstrous good time! In this collection of fifteen sweet, silly, and seriously fun rhyming poems, young readers will meet hungry ghouls, sneaky ghosts, and frisky skeletons, all who love partying in the moonlight. It’s a Halloween spook-tacular like no other!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442433984
Publisher:	Beach Lane Books
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	NP (what's this?)
Age Range:	5 - 10 Years

About the Author

Debbie Lepannen is an award-winning author of children’s poetry. She lives with her family in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Tad Carpenter is a designer, author, teacher, and illustrator of many books for young readers. The New York Times Book Review raved of his Zoom! Zoom!, “Any child obsessed with trucks or backhoes or trains or steam shovels should get a jolt of pleasure from the vehicular energy on display here.” He lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Visit him online at TadCarpenter.com.

Editorial Reviews

…vividly colored…Trick-or-Treat is fun to read aloud but accessible and appropriate for the youngest readers in the family; spooky enough to whet their appetites for the eve, but not so frightening they'll hide in the closet when the doorbell starts ringing.

The New York Times - Sarah Harrison Smith

Fifteen short and often silly poems introduce Halloween monsters and spooks that ham it up in Carpenter’s in-your-face digital cartoons. An enormous pink monster devours everything in sight, including the words of its poem, which appear inside his gaping mouth: “I eat spiders./ I eat slugs./ I eat any/ kind of bugs./ I eat cats/ and doggies too./ I eat rats/ (they’re fun to chew).” A creepier entry portrays a girl’s dark night of the soul after reading the names on tombstones: “I’ve read them all and now I’m done./ I’ve seen my name on every one.” A gently ghoulish collection of Halloween poems to provoke both giggles and chills. Ages 5–8. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Leppanen and Carpenter’s book is vividly colored and only sort-of-scary in a way that will seem familiar from TV cartoons and “Monsters Inc.”: grinning acid-green witches fly through purple skies; skeletons play Ping-Pong; and a mummy-mommy, wrapped in grave cloths, packs spider eggs for her mummy-son’s school lunch…. “Trick-or-Treat” is fun to read aloud but accessible and appropriate for the youngest readers in the family; spooky enough to whet their appetites for the eve, but not so frightening they’ll hide in the closet when the doorbell starts ringing."

NYTimes.com

"This collection of fifteen original Halloween-themed poems offers a playful variety of rhyming verses that mix longer descriptive pieces in with limericks and lists; the resulting collection is both entertaining and chock-full of crowd appeal. Humor abounds...and the fear factor never reaches beyond playfully spooky, making it a great selection for the younger set..... Carpenter’s high-contrast digital compositions are...amusingly imbued with a retro graphic feel; most spreads are day-glo bright, with a multicultural cast of human/monsterly figures shining out against a dark purple nighttime."

September 2013 The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"Leppanen can sling around Halloween iconography with the best of them.... Carpenter’s angular digital art has a Molly Bang–style boldness and uses bright primary colors to contrast the various ghoulies against (mostly) dark and brooding backgrounds. The ominous undertones of some of the poems are lightened by the art’s humorous details. Got an event involving a huddle of nervously giggling kids and a flashlight beneath the reader’s chin? Here’s your book."

Booklist

"These Halloween-y poems told from shifting perspectives—the scared trick-or-treating youngsters’ and the creepy monsters’—are great for both the expert cadence (they sound smashing aloud) and also the balance of tone. Some are mildly chilling.... Others are humorous.... The digital illustrations embody this mix, too: children wide-eyed with fear are greeted by benign-looking creatures just having a good time. A fun-filled, jaunty Halloween treat."

September-October 2013 Horn Book Magazine

"Leppanen can sling around Halloween iconography with the best of them.... Carpenter’s angular digital art has a Molly Bang–style boldness and uses bright primary colors to contrast the various ghoulies against (mostly) dark and brooding backgrounds. The ominous undertones of some of the poems are lightened by the art’s humorous details. Got an event involving a huddle of nervously giggling kids and a flashlight beneath the reader’s chin? Here’s your book."

Booklist

Overall, Leppanen's collection of 15 poems--some clever, some funny, some creepy and some ho-hum--should get kids in a Halloween frame of mind. On October 31st, just about anything can happen, as these selections prove. Readers can consider what they would do if their shadows stopped following them or how they would cope with a wickedly grinning monster that they notice only when brushing their teeth before bed (it's perched on this child's head). Some poems allow kids to ponder how different life might be if it was always populated with such creepy creatures. If their mothers were mummies, would they serve "worms on toast" for breakfast or pack "spider eggs for lunch"? Do pingpong-playing skeletons get the shivers, since they are nothing but bones? Is it ever a good idea to invite a ravenously hungry ghoul into the house? Does it make sense that witches ride mops instead of broomsticks when it rains? Carpenter digitally illustrates each poem with a double-page spread saturated with bright colors against the relatively darker backgrounds of nighttime. His cartoon characters comically display the slight frights they experience. But nothing is new or truly exciting here, leaving this average effort lacking in tricks or treats. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)

Kirkus Reviews