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juushikaAlexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is just a review I've had hanging around; the rest will be part of an ongoing trend called "picture books are an aesthetic and accessible way to experience spook season because they're quite literally filled with pictures while being easy to consume and generally pretty fun." The Magic Woods is what really kicked off Spooky Picture Book Season 2021. Not because it's autumnal—as this review mentions, "Treece's poem is set in Old World forests where kings are buried in barrows and larks are common. Moser, who grew up in Tennessee..., illustrates an American forest with wild grape vines, ferns, pines, and Spanish moss. Either way, the woods are magic." It's an all-forest, so shadowed as to be nearly universal, out of season, all-seasons; deep, dark, audaciously evocative. And it appears to have blessed me with a run of good spooky picture books! And more sitting at my bedside & on hold for which I have optimistic expectations.
Title: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Author: Judith Viorst
Illustrator: Ray Cruz
Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1987 (1972)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 375,355
Text Number: 1386
Read Because: I quote the title memetically so I figured I should also ... read the book..., hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: I love that there's no moral beyond "sometimes everything is awful and it sucks, little dude." Alexander makes himself more miserable and invites other people to treat him poorly, but that's more an inevitability than a condemnation; he doesn't have a breakthrough and become un-sad; the only goal is honest and humorous validation. This isn't a book from my childhood, its specifics of a very bad day aren't personally relatable, and I don't love the art—so this isn't a favorite, but it's very much & very effectively what it says on the tin.
Title: Ghost Cat
Author: Kevan Atteberry
Published: Neal Porter Books, 2019
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 376,855
Text Number: 1395
Read Because: reading spoopy picture books because it's autumn, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: This is a gentle, bittersweet, even playful approach to ghosts and frameworks for grieving. It's pleasantly true-to-cat, and panels like "Often at night I feel its weight, its warmth, its purring" made me have a genuine entire feeling. So I like this book a lot as a concept! But unfortunately not as much in execution. The cat's design is great; the protagonist's isn't, and the general lack of depth, texture, contrast, and dynamic line weight in the digital-heavy art feels, excuse the pun, dead.
(Also this came out in 2019 & it's about a dead cat: when will we stop putting indoor/outdoor cats in picture books? This isn't an egregious example of the problem since the ghost cat's adventures are largely indoors and one can squint and pretend it used to go outdoors on lead—but I'm just so, so sick of seeing outdoors cats depicted in a positive light.)
Title: The Magic Woods
Author: Henry Treece
Illustrator: Barry Moser
Published: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 376,885
Text Number: 1396
Read Because: found on this list of spooky picture books, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: For children insofar as the protagonist is young and nothing is actively inappropriate. But it doesn't feel written for kids, and the poem originally wasn't; if there's a moral, it's more "your wiles will protect you from fairies" than something about make-believe. And I'm not complaining!
It's not exceptional poetry; Moser's woodcuts sometimes have an uncanny/Photoshop-filter-esque realism. But in combination they're delightful: the spooky poetry is richly indulged by deep black-on-blue illustrations, and it goes all-in on atmosphere where most picture books intentionally hold back. You must not go into the woods at night! so a glimpse between the branches is moody, strange, and irresistibly forbidden.
Title: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Author: Judith Viorst
Illustrator: Ray Cruz
Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1987 (1972)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 375,355
Text Number: 1386
Read Because: I quote the title memetically so I figured I should also ... read the book..., hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: I love that there's no moral beyond "sometimes everything is awful and it sucks, little dude." Alexander makes himself more miserable and invites other people to treat him poorly, but that's more an inevitability than a condemnation; he doesn't have a breakthrough and become un-sad; the only goal is honest and humorous validation. This isn't a book from my childhood, its specifics of a very bad day aren't personally relatable, and I don't love the art—so this isn't a favorite, but it's very much & very effectively what it says on the tin.
Title: Ghost Cat
Author: Kevan Atteberry
Published: Neal Porter Books, 2019
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 376,855
Text Number: 1395
Read Because: reading spoopy picture books because it's autumn, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: This is a gentle, bittersweet, even playful approach to ghosts and frameworks for grieving. It's pleasantly true-to-cat, and panels like "Often at night I feel its weight, its warmth, its purring" made me have a genuine entire feeling. So I like this book a lot as a concept! But unfortunately not as much in execution. The cat's design is great; the protagonist's isn't, and the general lack of depth, texture, contrast, and dynamic line weight in the digital-heavy art feels, excuse the pun, dead.
(Also this came out in 2019 & it's about a dead cat: when will we stop putting indoor/outdoor cats in picture books? This isn't an egregious example of the problem since the ghost cat's adventures are largely indoors and one can squint and pretend it used to go outdoors on lead—but I'm just so, so sick of seeing outdoors cats depicted in a positive light.)
Title: The Magic Woods
Author: Henry Treece
Illustrator: Barry Moser
Published: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 376,885
Text Number: 1396
Read Because: found on this list of spooky picture books, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: For children insofar as the protagonist is young and nothing is actively inappropriate. But it doesn't feel written for kids, and the poem originally wasn't; if there's a moral, it's more "your wiles will protect you from fairies" than something about make-believe. And I'm not complaining!
It's not exceptional poetry; Moser's woodcuts sometimes have an uncanny/Photoshop-filter-esque realism. But in combination they're delightful: the spooky poetry is richly indulged by deep black-on-blue illustrations, and it goes all-in on atmosphere where most picture books intentionally hold back. You must not go into the woods at night! so a glimpse between the branches is moody, strange, and irresistibly forbidden.
