Olive and other Halloween book+costume ideas from Penguin

Welcome to Penguin's Halloween blog tour, which pairs spooky middle grade books with great costume ideas! I love the idea of dressing up as a character from a book, and I know lots of families and schools choose to celebrate Halloween this way, too. Today's (seventh and final) tour stop features the first book of one of my favorite middle grade series (my review), plus a fantastic giveaway! Here's Penguin with the details:

Step into some creepy stories this Halloween and become your favorite middle grade character…from the ghoulish undead to mischievous pirates, the costumes are endless.

The Book: Books of Elsewhere: The Shadows by Jacqueline West

When eleven-year-old Olive moves into a crumbling Victorian mansion with her parents, she knows there's something strange about the house - especially the odd antique paintings covering the walls. And when she puts on a pair of old spectacles, she discovers the strangest thing yet: She can travel inside the paintings, to a spooky world that's full of dark shadows. Add to that three talking cats, who live in the house and seem to be keeping secrets of their own, and Olive soon finds herself confronting a dark and dangerous power that wants to get rid of her by any means necessary. It's up to Olive to save the house from the dark shadows, before the lights go out for good.
The Costume
Halloween is the perfect time to be Olive and travel through paintings and beyond! This costume is great for a school-day costume:
  1. Olive wears a red striped shirt over a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, and red shoes. Don’t forget her yellow headband!
  2. Find the oldest, biggest glasses you can find. A grandparent might be able to help with this one!
  3. Now comes the fun part! Find a big piece of cardboard and cut out the shape of a BIG picture frame. Make the edges curvy and decorate with markers and paint. 
  4. You’re ready to be Olive! Carry around your new picture frame and wear your glasses for quick escape – but keep an eye out! There are people who might want to make sure your Halloween is full of more tricks than treats….
Find The Books of Elsewhere online at thebooksofelsewhere.com
Purchase The Books of Elsewhere here: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound 
And check out the rest of the blog tour for more great book+costume ideas:

M 10.22 In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz
T 10.23 Gustav Gloom and the People Takers by Adam-Troy Castro
W 10.24 Undead Ed by Rotterly Ghoulstone
Th 10.25 Deadweather and Sunrise:Chronicles of Egg by Geoff Rodkey
F 10.26 The Creature from the 7th Grade by Bob Balaban
M 10.29 Wereworld: Shadow of the Hawk by Curtis Jobling
T 10.30 Books of Elsewhere:The Shadows by Jacqueline West
right here at Books Together
 
[Me again.] And now for the giveaway! Courtesy of Penguin, I'm giving away a set of all seven books featured on the blog tour to one lucky reader (and commenter) on this post. Just leave a comment by midnight Friday, November 2 to enter [deadline extended due to Hurricane Sandy!]. If you'd like, let me know who you're going to be for Halloween, too. Olive, perhaps?

Extra Yarn, hold the needles

At last count, Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen (Balzer + Bray, 2012) had received four starred reviews. It's Klassen's second picture book--his first, I Want My Hat Back (Candlewick, 2011), also got a lot of attention and went on to win a well-deserved 2012 Geisel Honor. I'm not so sure about Extra Yarn, although I do love a picture book about knitting. I think Mars is a great name for a dog, too.

But back to the knitting. There's only one illustration in the whole book of Annabelle actually knitting something (it happens to be a sweater for a pickup truck, but that's another issue). And I'm pretty sure that the needles aren't supposed to be pointing up like that.

Does it matter, though? After all, the book is about a box that holds a never-ending supply of yarn of every color: Annabelle can probably knit it however she wants. And knitters as well as critics seem to love the book anyway. Maybe you are supposed to hold the needles that way, at least in picture books! Just don't try it at home.

Best Horn Book Cover Ever?

My long-awaited copy of the January/February 2012 issue of The Horn Book arrived today and it is gorgeous.  The cover illustration is by Salley Mavor, who illustrated the 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book picture book award winner, Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; link is to my review). You can see and read more about the process of making the cover illustration (I love the way she renders the Horn Book logo in particular. Also the little girl dressed as a lamb) and enter a poster giveaway on Salley's blog, or just order your poster directly from The Horn Book.

I've been a Horn Book subscriber for two years now (the inside of the magazine is just as good). Other favorite covers are Marla Frazee's hollow tree (May/June 2011), which also appears in her illustrations for the picture book Stars by Mary Lyn Ray (Beach Lane Books, 2011); and Anita Lobel's guardian angel (November/December 2010).

Which are your favorites? [There are lots more to choose from in the Horn Book Magazine's gallery of covers, too.]

Angela Barrett and The Hidden House

Children's illustrator Angela Barrett was featured in the Guardian's series A Life in Pictures last week (April 14, 2010).  This gorgeous image, the first in the slideshow, is from The Hidden House by Martin Waddell (1990), now out of print. I picked up a copy at a library sale a couple of years ago and promptly fell in love with Barrett's mysterious and beautiful work. The story itself is about the passage of time; both poignant and a little strange, I love it, too.

Bruno the lonely doll-maker makes three dolls to keep him company in his house in the woods before he dies and leaves them to rot away. Years later the house is brought back to life by a new family. The glorious splash of yellow in this double-page spread breaks away from the sombre greens and greys of the early part of the story.

Not to mention the blue jug of flowers, which looks like something by de Heem; and in fact several of the images in this book have the carefully composed quality of a Dutch still life. We like to count the cats here (there are five--no, six of them, one of which has tangled a spool of thread around the legs of a chair) and imagine climbing the curving blue staircase behind the yellow door.

[I've missed books together this spring.  I hope you have, too!  In any case, it's good to be back.]