From My Reading Chair…
There are pumpkins here. Pumpkins there. Pumpkins happy, sad, cheeky and magnificently mad!
In fact, there are so many pumpkins squeezed into this book that I half expected to open it and find one of them had rolled out overnight and claimed squatter’s rights in my living room.
The story itself is delightfully skeletal; one short sentence per page, a clear rhythm and plenty of room for the illustrations and a suitably excitable group of children to do the rest.
And oh, what fun there is in the rest. …..
“Pumpkin happy.” “Pumpkin sad.”
“Pumpkin cheeky.” “Pumpkin mad.”
Each tiny line becomes an invitation to pull a face, change your voice or act out the emotion before the next page has even turned. The repetition is easy to catch, easy to remember and wonderfully easy for children to join in with.
Then the sounds begin creeping in….
By the end, the onomatopoeia gives the reading even more bounce and noise. This is the sort of book that can start with one grown-up reading politely and end with an entire storytime hollering sound effects at a small mountain of imaginary vegetables! Just as nature intended, I'm sure!
The illustrations do an enormous amount of the storytelling. Bright oranges and playful purples tumble across the pages, with bold colour combinations that feel unmistakably Halloweenish without becoming gloomy or frightening.
But it is the pumpkin expressions that stayed with me most. They pout, grin, glower and look startled, mischievous and gloriously overdramatic.
With so few words on each page, those faces carry the emotional narrative and offer children an instant visual clue for how each moment might sound or feel. The compositions work beautifully alongside the text too, turning the pumpkins’ changing moods and movements into a small visual performance of their own.
Is this an enormously complicated story? No. Does it need to be? No, I don't think it does. Its sparseness is part of its usefulness. Every reread can become slightly different depending on the faces pulled, the voices chosen and precisely how much pumpkin chaos the room is willing to tolerate.
I would use this for storytime. I would place it face-out in a seasonal display. And I would happily leave it somewhere for children to revisit independently, because the illustrations give them so much to notice and the predictable text gives little readers words they can soon join in with.
A small story with a great many pumpkins and a surprisingly large invitation to play. Pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere indeed!
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!