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Pumpkin Shivaree
by Agran, Rick.

A pumpkin tells its life story, from seed to flower to jack-o-lantern and back to seed again.

Book Description
In the spring, a small silver seed is planted in the garden. By fall, it's a full-grown pumpkin on a long vine. The careful and accurate depiction of the development of a pumpkin - from seed to sprout to flower to fruit - is followed by a description of a wonderfully raucous Halloween romp so full of life and fun that the reader feels like the guest of honor!
The lyrical text by poet Rick Agran provides the perfect basis for Sara Anderson's clear, colorful cut-paper art, also used to brilliant effect in Hey Diddle Diddle, A Felt Read-And-Play Book. Pumpkin Shivaree brings to young readers not only solid information and the sense of a rollicking good party, but it also helps to convey the excitement that is generated over and over by Halloween, one of children's favorite holidays.

From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 2-The art stars in this seasonal mood piece, while the overweening poetics of the narrative meander like a pumpkin vine. "I started as a little silver seed," begins the oft-told life-cycle story, and, as is expected, it is a silver seed that survives the frenzy of Halloween and its aftermath, promising another season of pumpkins to come. Anderson's palette of brilliant greens, glowing oranges, purples, and blues seems borrowed from Matisse for the occasion, and her cut-paper art is similarly inspired, appropriately autumnal and rustic. The pictures are eloquent on their own. The text includes upsets such as the hapless pumpkin's persecution by fauna and weather, and its disturbingly gruesome evisceration, described in the victim's voice: "she thumps my belly like a baby drum.-opens her jack-o'-lantern knife. pulling my slippy slurpy insides out. Warm hands." Fresh copies of such storytime standards as Jeanne Titherington's Pumpkin, Pumpkin (Greenwillow, 1986), George Levenson's Pumpkin Circle (Tricycle, 1999), or Will Hubbell's Pumpkin Jack (Albert Whitman, 2000) may be preferred.
Kathy Krasniewicz, Perrot Library, Old Greenwich, CT
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