Favorite Halloween Books

I love a good scary story now and then, and today's the perfect time to pick one up. Here are my four favorite spooky/scary/Halloween stories:

Review: When You Reach Me

When I was younger I used to try to read my way through the list of Newbery Award winning books, and I've probably read about half of the winners. In recent years, though, I've fallen off — the last I read was Kate DiCamillo's 2004 The Tale of Desperaux. But the buzz about Rebecca Stead's 2010 Newbery winning book, When You Reach Me, encouraged me to pick up the title, which has parallels and references to another Newbery winner, Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 winner, A Wrinkle in Time.

Set in 1979 Manhattan, When You Reach Me is about Miranda, a sixth grader who lives in a dodgy neighborhood with her single mom. One day Miranda finds a strange note that seems to come from the future, and the letter writer asks Miranda to tell him about her life so she can help prevent a tragedy. Suddenly unusual events start happening: Miranda's best friend stops talking to her after he gets punched on the street, Miranda's mother earns a spot on $20,000 Pyramid, the spare apartment key disappears, Miranda makes some new friends (and gains a crush), and an eccentric "laughing man" takes up residence on her corner. Any one of these events would be monumental to a 12-year-old, but combine them, and Miranda is on one heck of a ride.

So are readers — the more I think about it, the more I like this novel. Miranda's voice and narrative style remind me of an older version of Opal from Because of Winn-Dixie: inquisitive and friendly, she's very likable.

When You Reach Me jumps around temporally at the beginning, mirroring the theme of time travel that runs throughout the book, which means that the plot is revealed slowly at first and you feel nearly as disoriented as Miranda. But as the book goes on you realize that past, present and future are all happening at once and that Stead's work is that expertly plotted.

Stead sets When You Reach Me within a few blocks — the action takes place in Miranda's apartment building, at school, and at Miranda's part-time job — a small world, but a world large and full of possibility for a 12-year-old. It's also set 30 years in the past; it feels like of retro, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Harriet the Spy, which were actually written decades ago. So it's also part-historical novel, and kids can see what it was like to grow up without the Internet and those little gadgets adults carry around constantly.

All these aspects make When You Reach Me a great novel for kids, but it is just as enjoyable for adults. And you can read it in an afternoon — how many great books geared towards adults can you say that about?

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with its hundreds of charcoal illustrations, film stills and hefty length, may be an atypical children’s book but the 2007 tome received much-deserved praise — it was awarded the Caldecott Medal last year and is being adapted for the screen.

Author Brian Selznick made a name for himself as an illustrator of children’s books, but The Invention of Hugo Cabret should make him a household name in the world of children’s literature. But with complex narrative structures, a richly imagined plot and more than 500 pages, The Invention of Hugo Cabret holds appeal for adults as well, particularly those with an interest in early cinema, a topic Selznick explores with a combination of deftness and whimsy.

The story, which is set in the 1930s, follows 12-year-old Hugo Cabret, who lives in a Paris train station, repairing clocks. An orphan, Hugo lives with his uncle, who mysteriously disappears one night, forcing Hugo to maintain a façade that his uncle is alive so he will not be sent to live in an orphanage.

Keeping him going is the fact that he holds a notebook bequeathed to him by his father, who repaired an automaton that he discovered in an old museum and wrote step-by-step instructions on how to do so in the notebook. A fire at the museum destroys the automaton and kills Hugo’s father, so for Hugo, finding and repairing the mechanical figure is imperative, since he is convinced that his father will be able to send him a message through the automaton.

Unfortunately for Hugo, who has brought the broken automaton to the station, he is forced to hand over the notebook to the man who runs the toy shop in the train station after he tries to steal toy parts. Hugo is unable to fix it until he meets a young girl, Isabelle, who wears the key to the automaton around her neck. Isabelle lives with the old man who runs the toyshop and she steals the notebook back for Hugo. Once repaired, the automaton draws a picture that sets the lives of all the characters in flux as strange histories and relationships emerge.

Words and illustrations pick up where the other left off seamlessly: pictures don’t illustrate the text; rather they stand alone, carrying the story forward. This device allows Selznick to tell a story that blends the literary and the artistic, appealing to the senses and drawing the reader further into the imaginative world that the author inhabits.

Selznick’s style, consisting of short paragraphs and sentences, is perfect for the 9-12 range, but The Invention of Hugo Cabret is more Hemingway novel than Dick and Jane book. Selznick writes:

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I’m not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is closely tied to the early days of cinema — Selznick delves into a semi-fictionalized plumbing of early French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who appears as a character in the book, and includes film stills from Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, a classic 1902 short. The focus on early film, coupled with illustrations, gives the book a cinematic quality that filmmakers will likely find easy to harness.

Adapted from a review originally published in the Washington Blade.

Favorite Fall Books: Pumpkin Moonshine, by Tasha Tudor

While most of the seasonal books I like are Christmas books, Tasha Tudor's 1938 book Pumpkin Moonshine is a perfectly wonderful autumn/Halloween book. In it, Sylvie Ann, who is visiting her grandparents on their farm, sets out in search of a pumpkin to carve and finds one of enormous size. She has to roll it down the hill to home, and the pumpkin takes off, with Sylvie Ann in pursuit.

Does anyone have any other favorite fall books?

The Magician's Elephant

Kate DiCamillo's new book, The Magician's Elephant, which was published in early September by Candlewick Press, follows in the tradition of her other books in several ways. We see, as we've seen in at least one of her other books — The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, The Tale of Desperaux and Because of Winn-Dixie — animal characters, lonely children, understanding adults, an important journey and life lessons. We also see, as we've come to expect from DiCamillo, exquisitely wrought prose and a heart-rending tale.

The Magician's Elephant is about an orphan named Peter, who is being raised by an old soldier determined to have Peter follow in his footsteps. One day Peter learns that the sister he thought had died is actually alive, and a fortune teller instructs him to follow the elephant to find her.

Meanwhile, a magician attempting to summon flowers out of thin air summons an elephant instead. The elephant breaks a woman's legs, and the magician is thrown into prison.

The stories of Peter and the magician are interwoven with those of Adele, Peter's sister, the couple who live below Peter and the soldier, an hunched-over stonecutter, and others. In each of her books, DiCamillo creates a half dozen characters who would be worthy of books on their own. She does it again here — each story depends on the others, but is also wonderful in its own right.

DiCamillo is a marvelous storyteller, and an equally skilled writer. The Magician's Elephant may be a fable, but I think it's her most sophisticated work yet.

In the Attic with Jon Scieszka

Jon Scieszka, the author of kids' classics like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, is also an advocate for literacy and started Guys Read to get boys reading. He has two new books out, Truckery Rhymes and Robot Zot! Scieszka will be appearing Saturday at the National Book Festival, and based on his reading last year (in which I, and many of the other adults in the audience, were in tears), you shouldn't miss it.

You’ve been to the National Book Festival in 2002 and 2008. What’s the experience like, and how is it different from other book events?

I’ve been a couple times. It’s spectacular. It’s really amazing to see how it’s grown. I was at the very first one, and there were just kind of seven or eight of us from the kids’ book world on stage, and last year there were 150,000 people, parents and kids. Everyone has something they’re interested in, and that’s the great thing about it. There are cookbook authors for cooking fans, mystery writers for mystery fans. It’s grown to be a beautiful, crazy thing.

Last year you read from Knucklehead. What will you be reading from this year?

This year I have two new books, one is Truckery Rhymes, for a younger audience and a picture book called Robot Zot! and [illustrator] Dave Shannon's going to be there two, so he and I are going to do some kind of presentation.

You taught elementary school for a while. Did you write while teaching? If not, how did you make the leap?

I taught for 10 years, which was great training and background for everything I do. I ended up teaching every grade from first to eighth and it gave me a new understanding of how kids’ brains worked, since they’re different from adults’.

Then I went and got a Master’s in fiction from Columbia and I was writing adult short stories, funny fiction, and I was getting published nowhere. It took me a couple years to put it together. I was teaching second grade at the time, and a light bulb went off — here are students, second graders are funny. I wrote The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and took a year off to write kids’ books and get rejected.

What do you think about the way the country is going in terms of literacy? How can we encourage more people to read?

We’re on very shaky ground with literacy in general. But what’s even more frightening is the state of boys and reading. We’ve been testing kids for over 25 years now, at the national level every year, and we’re finding out that boys are doing worse than girls. We don’t do anything about it, but then just test them again next year. This mania for testing has adversely affected reading too… Boys in particular see reading as some kind of school thing.

There are a ton of good books out there, and if you can get a kid entranced by a book to start, they’ll read another book and another book. Non-fiction and humor are undervalued in schools, where I see adults taking away that book, saying ‘you can’t keep reading books about sharks and volcanoes.’ But I say, ‘maybe you can. Maybe you’re just a shark and volcano guy.’

What’s up next for you?

I’m working on a couple projects. One is to help kids understand media literacy. It’s called Space Headz, and it’s three about three aliens going to take over the world and they’re not too bright and end up taking over a fifth grade. One becomes a fifth grade boy, one becomes a fifth grade girl and one becomes the class hamster. There’s also going to be a web site, because the challenge is that Space Headz needs to sign up 3.14 million people to save the world, and it becomes an active experience. Fluffy the hamster is writing a blog, and you get the story from different parts and you have to decide what’s real and what’s not real.

I’m also working on an anthology called Guys Write for Guys Read, which will be a five volume set by genre. The first one is Guys Read humor, and will have a bunch of funny writers writing longer pieces. Ultimately we want to have kids who come to the library and say ‘I don’t have anything to read,’ and they can say, ‘check out our Guys Read library, there’s 12 funny stories in there, or 12 pieces of nonfiction.

Photo credit: Marty Umans

In the Attic with Kate DiCamillo

Kate DiCamillo is the author of children's books, including Because of Winn Dixie and The Tale of Desperaux. Her new book, The Magician's Elephant, was released earlier this month. She will be appearing at the National Book Festival on Saturday.

You went to the National Book Festival in 2002. Have you been to any others? What was the experience like, and how is it different from other book events?

I went one other year [2004], so I’ve done it twice. Both times it just got a huge turnout and people are really passionate there. I felt a little like a rock star there which is kind of nice but also disconcerting.

Animals play such important roles in your stories. What are some differences between how you create animal characters versus human characters?

Sadly none at all. [laughs] Animals are just another character and they seem as real to me as the human ones, which reveals how psychologically disturbed I am. I never thought about that, but they’re the same as human characters.

Do you have a pet of your own?

I’m leaning on him right now. His name is Henry and his eyebrows just went up. He’s a poodle-terrier mix, a mutt.

You create such a wonderful sense of place in each of your books. What are some places that are particularly inspiring to you?

I was recently just in your neck of the woods. My aunt lives in Arlington and my brother and I visited her. Our mom passed away recently and we went to spread her ashes in the Chesapeake Bay, and that will probably show up in something. It’s so gorgeous there. We went to where she grew up, which is like part of Annapolis, Bay Ridge. That was just great and I keep thinking about that.

Florida is always in the back of my mind, and the landscape here in Minneapolis, up north on the shore of Lake Superior is always in my head and my heart.

Where did the inspiration for The Magician’s Elephant come from?

I was in the lobby of a hotel in New York waiting to meet someone and an image of this desperate magician appeared before me. This was a magician who was third rate and wanted to perform real magic, so I got out my notebook to write a description of him. When I was reaching into my purse, I saw another notebook, one I was giving to someone as a gift that had an elephant on the cover. I went from the magician wanting to do real magic and an elephant appearing and it seemed like a story to me.

In what ways is this new book different from others you’ve written? Either the book itself or the process of writing it.

It just about killed me. It was so hard to write and Edward was the last novel and that kind of wrote itself. That doesn’t happen very often. But this was more like Desperaux, and I was so focused on all the different characters and I had all these different balls in the air, and I had no idea how it would work out. When I look back on writing it, it was a long rocky road.

I think your books are great for all ages and everyone can enjoy them, but how did you know you wanted to write books that end up in the children’s section versus books for adults?

Thank you for saying that! That’s my pie in the sky dream, that I can be a storyteller for everyone. It happened roughly when I moved to Minneapolis and I got a job in a book warehouse. I was assigned to the third floor with all the kids’ books. I went around picking books off the shelves and as a reader you’re bound to start reading what you’re picking up, and that’s what I did. I fell in love with what you could do with books for kids. The first novel I read that was written for kids was The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 and I thought I wanted to try to do something like that.

Did you always write?

I did, I started where most people start, which is short stories for adults, thinking that it’s shorter and therefore easier. I still occasionally write short stories for adults, and some have been in literary journeys, but it’s far more enjoyable writing for kids, and I think part of that is the potential for magic.

What do you think about the way the country is going in terms of literacy? How can we encourage more people to read?

I always came at it from my own bias, which is the power of story and I was one of those kids who felt like again and again what I got in the library saved me and it was stories that helped me understand the world I was in. When parents say ‘how can I make my kids read?’ I say, ‘Do they see you reading books for your own pleasure?’ I think that reading can sustain you for a lifetime and it helps you talk about your in the world and understand your place in the world and help you dream and that’s what I think reading should be.