A Bit of Spook

It seems to be that time of year – Halloween. The time for spooks and goblins and weird costumes. The time for dressing up and being silly or scary or silly scary. Halloween doesn’t mean much to me. It seems like just about every day is Halloween around here. I’m always being dressed in some silly costume. For some reason my Mom Person gets a kick out of making me look silly. It’s kind of fun to get a laugh from the kids though.

The Mom Person likes Halloween a bit. It provides an excuse to send packages to my Princesses who are far away. She and Electra did some Halloween book shopping at Half-Price Books and they found a couple of good ones that are going in this year’s Halloween package.

The Candy Witch
by Steven Kroll
illustrated by Marylin Hafner
published by Scholastic in 1986 (originally published by Holiday House in 1979)

This is a pretty cute story about a family of witches that like to cast GOOD spells for people. Mama Witch and Papa Warlock and Brother John are always doing spells like turning garbage into fruit trees and giving bald men hair. Maggie does GOOD spells, too, but no one seems to notice. She finds it very frustrating. So in order to get noticed, she tries doing some crazy spells, like having lizards come out of a friend’s bathroom faucet and turning a chair into a blueberry pie. But STILL nobody notices. So on Halloween night she made all the kids’ bags of candy disappear.

This made all the kids very sad and some even cried. That made Maggie feel sad and very sorry for what she had done. Maggie began to cry. Her family noticed this! What was wrong with Maggie?! When she told them how she was trying to be noticed, the family felt very bad. Now everyone is feeling bad! But Maggie has a great idea for fixing the whole thing and make everyone happy again. And if you read the book, you will find out what she did!! It will make you smile and cheer!!

Ghosts in the House!
by Kazuno Kohara
published by Scholastic (originally published by Square Fish, an imprint of Macmillan, in 2008)
A New York Times Best Illustrated Book

This is a pretty unique little picture book — it’s all orange and black and white!! Orange pages, Black illustrations, and White Ghosts! This is about a little girl and her cat who move into a house that turns out to be haunted! (I don’t know where this girls parents are. No where to be seen. She’s all alone except for her cat!) But the girl is not afraid of a haunted house, because —– She’s a Witch!! And she knows how to catch ghosts! She caught them all, washed them in the washing machine, hung them out to dry, then decorated her house with them! Very clever and silly! A very cute book!!

Here is a reading of Ghosts in the House – in Japanese!

I hope that my Princesses like these Spooky books! It’s that time of year!

Hope you have a Spooky Halloween!
But not tooooo Spooky!
Your library friend
Rhythm