Her words fairly trip off the tongue: 'In the Halloween house, / on a bed made of pine, / a mama vampire woke / with her little ones, nine. The Halloween House is an absolute delight! Silverman, who also penned the popular Halloween story to be found in Big Pumpkin, delivers a rollicking, cleverly monstrous take on the old rhyme. Is it any wonder that the convicts flee the house, returning to their cell.? As the horrified convicts watch in terror, ten werewolves howl, nine vampires rise, eight worms squirm, seven bats swoop, six ghosts book, five monsters chase, four skeletons dance, three spiders swing, two cats pounce, and one little witch flies. As two escaped convicts, who appear only in illustrator Jon Agee's artwork, make their way through the house, various monster parents instruct their children on the proper course of action. Let these crayons go back into their box.Using the traditional English counting rhyme, Over in the Meadow, as an inspiration, author Erica Silverman spins a spooky tale about the Halloween House on Halloween night in this entertaining picture-book. The multimedia illustrations, done in the same style as the other series entries, are always fun, but perhaps it’s time to retire these anthropomorphic coloring implements. When Purple observe that Esteban’s green rectangle isn’t an egg, Esteban responds, “No, but MY GOSH LOOK how magnificent it is!” Still, that won’t save this lackluster book, which barely scratches the surface of Easter, whether secular or religious. The joke doesn’t really work, the shapes are not clear enough for a concept book, and though colors are delineated, it’s not a very original color book. Then the conversation turns to hiding the large object in plain sight. They take the circle decorated with red shapes, the square adorned with orange squiggles “the color of the sun,” the triangle with yellow designs, also “the color of the sun” (a bit repetitious), a rectangle with green wavy lines, a white star, about which Purple remarks: “DID you even color it?” and a rhombus covered with blue markings and slap the shapes onto a big, light-brown egg. Purple, perplexed and almost angry, keeps asking why no one is creating an egg, but the six friends have a great idea. Six crayons (Red, Orange, Yellow, Esteban, who is green and wears a yellow cape, White, and Blue) each take a shape and scribble designs on it.

The halloween house erica silverman