Hallowilloween: Nefarious Silliness from Calef Brown, by Calef Brown

Title: Hallowilloween: Nefarious Silliness from Calef Brown     Author/Illustrator: Calef Brown

Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 40 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children (September 6, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0547215401
ISBN-13: 978-0547215402

Synopsis: Welcome to a spooky, silly world of tongue twisters and crazy rhymes all centered around the creatures one might see in a Halloween-themed town. There's the Vumpire to ump the baseball games (but only at night), the Grim Reaper, a werewolf and even a witch or two in Hallowilloween.

Review: Calef Brown's fun, freaky verse is perfectly paired with acrylic illustrations to tickle the funny bone of anyone who loves Halloween. But the book is not only fun for kids; parents who have a broader reading base than their children will enjoy Brown's riffs on classical literature (The Portrait of Gory Rene/The Picture of Dorian Gray) and references to traditional Halloween ghouls and beasties.

Awards/Reviews:

A Junior Library Guild Selection

"A modern master of nonsense verse reaches new heights of giddiness with this Halloween-themed collection. . . . Nefariously silly indeed."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Brown's acrylic illustrations add to the creepy silliness: an artful mix of naive and stylized, whimsical details and vibrant color. Young readers will relish the wordplay and find themselves torn to choose a favorite among this wacky menagerie."- School Library Journal, starred review

Connections:

The teacher should connect his/her computer to the projector and go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_b8_jN1l4. Here the teacher can show the class a video of Calef Brown reciting nonsense poetry, then reciting poems from "Hallowilloween." Ask the students how the setting the author chose complimented what he was reading/discussing.

So much of the impact of the poems in "Hallowilloween" comes from Brown's illustrations. Ask the students to pick one poem to illustrate their own way. After the students have finished, ask them to answer some questions. What elements and colors did they choose, and why? How do they think this contributed to the mood of the poetry? How would the poems seem different if Brown used bright, happy colors?