From My Reading Chair…
One of my all-time favourite stories. EVER. Like ever, ever.
I read this every year when spooky season comes a-rattling in, and, well, pretty much at any given opportunity throughout the year! Honestly, ask my nephews, nieces, friends and the MANY schoolchildren I have performed this tale for.
So, the plot… well, it’s deceptively simple. An overworked, cranky, mean witch has BIG plans for a properly frightening Halloween party. (I mean; hard relate!) But the magic of Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet is how they make the ordinary extraordinary, with hilarity and calamity in abundance. The witch’s time-saving solution? Delegate the work to a pile of pumpkins. An entire patch of free labour. (UNIONISE PUMPKINS, UNIONISE!)
Her motley pumpkin crew are grumpy, gross little grunts with what I can only imagine is a litany of misdemeanours and possibly two or three ASBO's between them, well, at least in my head they do!
Then Christopher arrives, exploding across the page turn in a fizz of fuchsia pink and glitter. A bespectacled cutie pie among the sinister squash squad!
Christopher gets busy working on a very different type of party, much to their ever-amusing befuddlement. (THAT END REVEAL!) Oh, Christopher, I adore you! His cheerfulness is gloriously and gorgeously at odds with the witch’s plans, and his very Christopher-ish idea of a celebration is such a fun twist.
Hendra and Linnet give us so much to play with aloud: voices, actions, changes of tempo and a party that grows more wonderfully chaotic as we go. This is a book I read with my whole face, my entire body and fancy-dress props too. It’s a riot of comedic spooktacular fun.
And Nick East’s Snaggletooth Lane? My dream address. Genuinely, I want to move in immediately, although the millennial housing ladder is difficult enough without having to compete with witches & monsters, well more than normal anyway. His bold, neon illustrations illuminate the nooks, crannies and creases of this book, and there’s an abundance of gleefully revolting little details to gawp at on the inevitable rereads. I’m yearning to be the castle’s fair foreman.
Charming, wholesome, funny, gross, empathetic, weird, joyous, wicked and wonderful. I love the characters, the setting, the playfulness and Christopher himself. He is defiantly, loudly himself, without a mean seed in his little pumpkin body. The more I sit with Christopher, the more I realise how much that unapologetic, wholehearted you-ness means to me.
And I have a feeling a whole patch of pumpkins might discover the joy of being their own sparkle-glitter party planning selves too!
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!
