Pumpkin Orange, Pumpkin Round

Cats enjoy all the glories of a human Halloween in this peek at popular October traditions. In Anderson’s colored pencil and acrylic glaze illustrations, a family of smiling, scarf-wearing felines heads to a pumpkin patch, where an errant mouse sends one pumpkin rolling. There, they select the sizable squashes they’ll cart home to carve into jack-o’-lanterns (“Pumpkin drawing/pumpkin trace,/ pumpkin carving,/ pumpkin face!”). After donning costumes, the cats go trick-or-treating as the festive evening continues (“pumpkin candy, pumpkin scare”) and return home for their bedtime routine. Battigelli’s text—a series of rhyming, two-word phrases each beginning with “pumpkin”—sometimes results in perplexing phrases (“Pumpkin partridge/ pumpkin mouse,/ pumpkin wheeling,/ pumpkin house”) but possesses a jaunty rhythm and a fun-to-pronounce quality. Ages 3–6. [em](Oct.) [/em]