From My Reading Chair…
A gourd-geous little menace with Halloween hunger in its eyes!
That is what greets us from the cover of The Pumpkin Who Stole Halloween: maniacal, magnificent and very clearly planning mischief!
I was thrilled before I had even opened the book.
Then the vine-covered endpapers creep around, engulfing my eyeballs and dragging me straight into the story.
“ME WANT HALLOWEEN!” Well, me too, Pumpkin. Me too!
This is one of the freshest, funniest and most magnificently unruly Halloween stories I have encountered in ages. It’s a proper riotous romp of rhythm, wickedly funny, with a storytelling momentum that keeps gathering speed while its central vegetable grows increasingly enormous and increasingly committed to feasting on the festivities!
The artwork demands to be looked at. Bold, bright and almost neon, its palette doesn’t request our attention politely; it bangs cutlery on the table and orders us to FEAST upon it.
Tom Knight’s alternation between panels, vignettes and expansive spreads gives the pumpkin’s rampage a riotous sense of scale. Smaller sequences let us follow the stages of growth and gobbling, while the larger images allow the chaos to burst beyond its rind-restricted containment.
And chaos there most certainly is! Mischief. Shenanigans. Devouring. Basically, the joyful destruction of anything foolish enough to stand between one hungry pumpkin and Halloween.
Yet the book never loses control of its own mayhem. Michelle Robinson’s language carries the action with gorgeous lyrical fluidity, making it enormously enjoyable to read aloud. The phrasing rolls, the momentum builds and the pumpkin’s escalating hunger gives a performer ample room for voices, volume, timing and increasingly unhinged vegetable behaviour.
It is funny enough to make its message feel discovered rather than delivered. There is a hint of morality folded into the mush (wanting everything for yourself has consequences), but it never chokes the life from the story or marches the pumpkin to a lectern for a worthy little speech. Thank Gourd! Many books can offer mischief or meaning; fewer can mash both together without producing a lumpy seasonal sermon.
I can already hear a roomful of children joining in with “ME WANT HALLOWEEN!” as the pumpkin’s greed grows and the whole thing gets gloriously out of hand.
It has huge rereadability because its pleasures operate at every level: the sound of the language, the visual jokes, the changing compositions, the escalating scale and the sheer audacity of its central gourd.
LOVE LOVE LOVE. ADORE LOVE. COVET AND ADORE MORE.
The Pumpkin Who Stole Halloween gives us chaos, consequence and joy in one unruly bowl of pumpkin pulp. This is Halloween storytelling with its vines let loose and its table manners abandoned.
A gourd-geous little menace has stolen the holiday and my heart along with it!
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!
