The 13 Nights of Halloween

PreS-Gr 2—Using the formula for "The 12 Days of Christmas," Vasilovich has created a mildly spooky rhyme for Halloween. On the first night of the holiday, a small girl with an oversize head, huge eyes, and antennaelike pigtails receives a bright, shiny skeleton key from her mummy. Each successive night, a spread describes the next eerie gift and recaps the previous presents. Some of these alliterative offerings are clever: icky eyeballs, baseball bats, singing skulls, corpses caroling, and marching mutants. But others are merely redundant: witches witching and ghosts a-ghosting. The illustrations are delightfully macabre. The smiling little ghoul and the bright, angular creatures she is given are set against swirling backgrounds that should elicit squeals from youngsters who are looking for slightly scary stories.—Martha Simpson, Stratford Library Association, CT