100 books like 10 Spooky Pumpkins

While the imagery and color palette seem simplified in Eric Rohmann’s Bone Dog, the mastery of his black line carries the art for me in this touching tale about a boy and his dog.

Rohmann uses a woodcut technique to create his black outlining. To actually carve around a drawn image, leaving the drawing raised up to ink and print on paper takes a tremendous amount of time for a 32-page picture book. The results are well worth it, these pages are stunning.

What I really love is the little bits of black around many of the carved areas having picked up some of the ink and left on the print, giving an added sense of movement, similar to cartoon motion lines. The dancing skeletons and running dogs really come to life!

The background washes of rich blue watercolor enhance the Halloween night mood, resulting in a beautiful mix of… show more.

This book is super funny. Sir Simon’s expressions are priceless. I love how Sir Simon looks grumpy but kind inside.

The layout and comic-like style make this book dynamic and fun to read. Cale’s artwork is super expressive, vibrant, and funny.

What I loved most about Ashley Wolff’s How to Help a Pumpkin Grow was her color! This luscious book is filled with gorgeous, intense full-spectrum color! Wolff’s wet on wet washes flow seamlessly into each other as a base layer. I am guessing, there may be some smooth pastel added to enhance the color in places. Wolff’s adept painting skill brings out details with multi-colored painted line work on top of the washes. 

Unusual touches like the addition of saturated royal blue to highlight the black coat of the dog and crow feathers add an interesting pop of color. The great asset of acrylic gouache is that it can be both transparent or opaque, enabling Wolff to add light line work on top of dark washes.

Gorgeous work, Ashley Wolff!

While I love traditional painting as well as digital art, I also love imaginative and unconventional mixings of media. Harriet Muncaster’s sweet book I Am a Witch’s Cat exhibits beautifully staged photos of hand-built miniature scenes complete with fabrics and of all things, flat cut-out line art with simple color.

Added elements of strong light sources pouring in through windows and doors casting shadows that enhance the 3D effects. Little details like sunlight passing through a stained glass-like door cast a charming shadow that bends around a corner.

All the photographed scenes are faced with a flat 2D illustration with the type on the opposite page. The resulting images of hand-built props mixed up with flat line art make me want to pull out the old dollhouse and dress it up.

Cheers to you, Harriet Muncaster!

Two adorable mice enter a contest, one to carve the biggest jack-o’-lantern ever, the other to grow the biggest pumpkin ever. It turns out that they fall in love with the same pumpkin. One waters it during the day. The other waters it at night. Neither mouse knows about the other’s efforts. When they discover that they’re each contributing to the same pumpkin’s growth, they decide to work together to win the competition. This classic book with endearing illustrations will appeal to kids who love pumpkins and who value cooperative effort to achieve success.

The simplicity of the illustrations here is so marvelous and cute! I love how this book shows that you don’t have to be just like the other pumpkins—or the other kids—to be happy and find your place in the world. This is a nice, short one (which is so needed for bedtime), and the pages where the pumpkin is getting carved are so striking and illustrated. Don’t worry, kids won’t be scared about the dear pumpkin getting carved—it’s presented as the pumpkin’s biggest dream to be a jack o’ lantern! 

I love reading aloud, and I love read-aloud books that have sounds or actions that the reader and listeners can do as they follow the story. This book is delightfully physical—as you clap, clomp, wiggle, nod, and boo along with the shoes, pants, shirt, top hat, gloves, and pumpkin head that the little old woman meets as she walks home one night. Being followed by clomping shoes or wiggling pant legs might be terrifying, but this little old woman is not afraid of anything, something she proves when all these animate items come knocking at her door. Bravely she offers them a task where they can really be frightening—and the clomping shoes, wiggling pants, shaking shirt, clapping gloves, nodding hat, and boo-crying pumpkin head become the perfect scarecrow in the little old woman’s cornfield. Such a fun book!

Not only is this a complete history of pumpkins – it’s a fascinating history of America. There’s good, solid jack-o-lantern history alongside descriptions and photos of the gazillion ways we celebrate, decorate, grow, eat, idolize, and display pumpkins. Emerging as a symbol of lust in medieval Europe, the pumpkin became synonymous with the American wilderness, then came to stand for rustic life, and now Halloween. If you like history and Americana as well as Halloween, you’ll like this one. And if you’re a Halloween nerd like I am, you’ll love the 100 pages of footnotes.

This Halloween rendition of the traditional Over in the Meadow counting rhyme is so well done. The finely crafted verses feature goblins, ghosts, skeletons, and other spooky creatures. Beautiful, colorful, atmospheric scenes by Jane Manning compliment the story inviting the reader to pause on each page to admire the art, count the characters, and smile. As an illustrator myself, I appreciate the wonderful design and compositions. Both the story and characters are sweet and hardly scary, so it’s a great pick for younger children, especially those who might be easily frightened.

Rebecca Estelle hates pumpkins—and this is something kids can hardly imagine. (Certainly, the gorgeous art makes you wonder how anyone could hate pumpkins!) But Rebecca Estelle had a chapter in life where pumpkins were pretty much all she had to eat and so she is sick of them.

However, when she accidentally grows an enormous pumpkin patch, Rebecca Estelle has to deal with the loathed pumpkins. And deal with them she does—pies and muffins and tarts and cookies and roasted seeds come out of her kitchen. She carves fabulous jack-o-lanterns (a magical two-page spread!) and her neighbors show up. “We thought you hated pumpkins!” they say. And Rebecca Estelle presses pumpkin treats and seeds into their hands.