good story book

AND THEN COMES HALLOWEEN

It’s embedded in the time of year, in the fading light, crunchy leaves and icy air. Brenner’s text and Meade’s cut-paper collages summon a family, a neighborhood, a whole world attuned to the simple pleasures of a homemade Halloween, “when tombstones sprout on lawns like mushrooms, and ghosts swoop from trees.”

Dad helps with the cardboard robot; a daughter cuts and tapes a paper witch’s hat and wig; children scoop seeds for a jack-o’-lantern. This home at Halloween is an enchanted place, and you’ll want to go there again and again. Enchantment, more literally, is the subject of “Spells,” by Emily Gravett - or is it Gribbitt? - a cheeky picture book that tells the story of an imaginative frog who finds a book of spells. Its neat conceit is that the wishful frog is a self-starting magician - he begins conjuring things by merely tearing the book’s pages to make a sailboat, a hat, a spyglass and a castle, before hitting on a more effective technique: mixing strange words to cast spells on the way to becoming, maybe, a handsome prince. But because his book - that is, the book inside this book - is already in shreds, startling mix-ups await.

The words of the spells are jumbled and interchangeable, as young readers will see when they encounter inside pages cut into flaps that can be flipped and read in various ways, and are sprinkled with magic words like “Slimykazoot,” “Alaka mince” and “Bim bam Barebum,” the last set of syllables being less nonsensical than you might think. A bit of fine print in the front of “Spells” tells us that the illustrations are rendered in pencil, watercolor, shredded paper and “a sprinkling of glitter,” and there’s glitter, too, in the mischievous spirit of this witty book.

Longing and magic are also central to “Only a Witch Can Fly,” by Alison McGhee, with illustrations by Taeeun Yoo. On Halloween night a little girl dreams of flying on her broomstick:

The dark night around you fills with Fly, fly,
and bright yellow moonlight shines down.
Cat, by your side, purrs a gentle Bye, bye,
and Owl stares up at a star, so far.

An old form, and a rigorous one, where “the same words, or related words, end the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time.” The poem wears its rigidity lightly, weaving an effect that is languorous and incantatory. “How awful it is not to fly in the sky” (here, the would-be witch is crash-landing into pumpkins in the backyard), “With the moon and the stars so high / and the smoke rising up like a plume.”

The effortless quiet of McGhee’s words is beautifully matched by Yoo’s pictures - linoleum block prints done in rapturously moody greens and browns. It’s clear she’ll need some magic, too. You could have the book, click HERE

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Memoirs of a Geisha

Barack Obama Book; The Audacity of Hope.

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