An immensely engaging Halloween poem, written in unmetered rhyme by author Marion Dane Bauer, is paired with gorgeously creepy artwork from illustrator John Shelley in The Halloween Forest, which follows its young protagonist as he heads out of town and makes for the eponymous forest. Here he finds all kinds of bone-creatures cavorting, but is undismayed, insisting on trick-or-treating all the same...

I greatly enjoyed the text here, both because it is spooky and evocative, and because the structure and rhythm is a bit more complicated than what I usually find in rhyming picture-books. I'm a big believer in rhyme, as I find that the musical nature of the text, when read aloud, will hold the attention of younger child-listeners, and keep them entertained, even if they don't understand every word. That said, such picture-books tend to fall into two categories in my mind: the simpler, more limerick-y Dr. Seuss style text, that rolls off the tongue naturally, and the more complex text that has unexpected twists and turns, and requires a little more care to read. Bauer's narrative belongs to the latter category (as does Kirsten Hall's recent The Honeybee), and that is all to the good. The artwork here, created using pen and ink and watercolor, is absolutely lovely! The scenes in the forest, with the various bony creatures gathered around the boy, somehow manage to be both beautiful and creepy. The arrangement of the text on the page is carefully done, so that Shelley's artwork can accentuate its structure, and complement its meaning. On one page, for instance, as the narrator asks: Will you sigh? / Will you cry? / Will you dash away / in utter dismay?," the words themselves are arranged on the bones of a human hand, with the four lines appearing on the four fingers (thumb out of sight), and each word appearing on a separate bone. This might just be a clever use of image to support the textual structure, but it also struck me, while reading that page, that the image used could evoke the idea of fear that is explored in that portion of the text, as peering through one's fingers might be something a terribly frightened person would do.

However that may be, this was just an immensely engaging Halloween tale, one I would particularly recommend to young children who want something a little more scary than what is usually seen in picture-books for this season. ( )

Summary:
Written in the second person point of view, the story begins with a child (You!) leaving the safety of their neighborhood. They find a forest full of bones. Cat bones, rat bones, bat bones. The trees are bones. All the bones are looking at YOU. They cry out and try to spook you, but do you run away? No! You're too tough for that, and you have your own bones too. You scare them back and then say "Trick or treat." The bone forest has no choice but to give you all its candy.

Personal Reaction:
I absolutely love Halloween and all things spooky, so this is definitely a favorite for me. I think it has just the right amount of silliness and spookiness to be thrilling but not too creepy for young ones. The illustrations are amazing, and again, the right amount of cute and spooky. This would be such a great book to read near Halloween.

Classroom Extension Ideas:
1. Since the story has a lot of opportunities to do "jump scares" it may be fun to have someone in the audience or around the room who will make spooky noises or shout "Boo!" at all the right moments
2. The book is written in unmetered rhyming verse, so having students identify the words that rhyme on each page, or coming up with rhymes of their own
3. Ask them how they would have handled that situation, or describe a time when they had faced their fears or how they could face their fears in the future. ( )

The text has kind of a weird flow, but the illustrations are great.

Grades K-2

A story in rather clunky verse about a child (can't quite tell if it's a boy or girl in a black flowy costume with some tufts of blond hair sticking out from a tight-fitting hood) who ventures out of town and braves a forest of bones. As the child moves through the forest, where "hanging from the branches are bat bones/ climbing the trunks are cat bones/ snarled in the roots are rat bones," there is an expression of trepidation but not outright fear. After several pages of all kinds of skeletal animals, the narrator asks, "And you? Will you sigh? Will you cry? Will you dash away in utter dismay?" The child breaks out in a big grin. Of course not! (S)he is much too brave to let "the rattle and prattle" of a few bones stand in the way of yelling the well-known "Trick or treat! Smell my feet! Give me something good to eat!" which results in a shower of Halloween candy from the forest. The watercolor illustrations from John Shelley are charming and suitably spooky, and will certainly draw readers in... too bad that the accompanying verses are so lackluster.
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A genial Halloween treat. ( )