Scary, Scary Halloween by Eve Bunting, pictures by Jan Brett, 1986.
I love the pictures in this book and enjoy the rhyming text of the story. It’s a cute concept for Halloween, and young children will enjoy the repetition in the story.
One Halloween night, unseen watchers observe children in costume trick-or-treating. The mother cautions her children to remain hidden because of all the strange creatures that are out and about on Halloween.
Readers will know that the monsters are simply children in costume, but the watchers do not because they are cats, which is only revealed at the end of the story. Throughout most of the book, they only appear as green eyes as they hide under the porch of a house.
When all the trick-or-treaters are gone, the mother cat and her kittens are free to roam the night themselves.
I thought that it was cute how the mysterious tone of the book was due to the cats’ understanding of Halloween. At first, it may seem very mysterious to young children as well, but completely understandable as it becomes more and more obvious that all the monsters are only trick-or-treaters and the little family hiding from them are cats, who think of themselves as being pretty fierce in their own right.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
One Halloween, Jenny goes to visit Nancy, a woman who local people say is a witch. Jenny is curious about magic and, knowing that there are magical creatures abroad on Halloween, she wonders if she might see something unusual at Nancy’s house.
This is a kind of cautionary story about the dangers of curiosity. Jenny’s curiosity invites the attention of dangerous creatures and leads her into a frightening situation, something that she never wants to repeat. For the most part, I think that curiosity is a trait that should be encouraged, but Jenny did deliberately seek out a person with a dangerous reputation and pry into the things she was doing, even trying some herself because she wanted to know more about it, so she could be considered to have gone looking for trouble.
A boy called Nicky and his mother are looking for a new place to live somewhere in New England. The mother wants to buy an old cottage with the idea of turning it into a tea room. At first, they have trouble finding a place, but finally they buy an old house that badly needs fixing up, not knowing that there is an old witch living there.
Cranberry Autumn by Wende and Harry Devlin, 1993.
School is about to start, and Maggie and her grandmother realize that they’re short of money. Maggie needs new school clothes, and her grandmother needs a new coat. They know that some of their neighbors could also use some more money, so Grandmother suggests that they hold a sale. Some of them have some antiques and other interesting old items that they could sell.
