by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 16, 2010

Here's a ghost story for you. Margaret Wise Brown had been for nearly 50 years. But on Halloween night - or thereabouts - her publishers resurrected a "long-lost treasure"  called "The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin." The book's jacket applauds Brown's ability to see the world through a child's eyes. But in this book, she's seeing the world  through the eyes of a pumpkin!

"Ho! Ho! Ho...! When I grow up, I will scare the field mice out of the field like the scarecrow does!"

Unfortunately, the pumpkin's face stays perfectly smooth - since after all, it's just a pumpkin in the garden. (And he illustrator even draws three field mice, leaning against the pumpkin with casual expression, one even lying back with its eyes closed.) "The little pumpkin would dearly have loved to make a fierce, ferocious gobble-gobble face like the scarecrow's at the far end of the field." But instead he watches that scarecrow in action, as the wind blows its hair and dislodges a scarecrow eye.

"...if there is anything that a blackbird is scared of, it is a one-eyed scarecrow."

Like "Goodnight Moon," Wise gently describes the sighs and sounds around a familiar location. But this time the details provide the story for the life of a pumpkin. In the crisp air there's the smell of burning leaves, and flocks of birds flying south. And then the frosts come at night, and the little yellow pumpkin discovers its color is changing into a very fierce orange.

Even the field mice look chilly!  Richard Egielski had already won a Caldecott Medal for illustrating "Hey, Al," and he provides this story with some rich atmospheric drawings. There's grey storm clouds when the blackbirds fly over, and a blue shadow over the house of the neighboring children. And when they finally carve open the pumpkin, their windows are filled with a bright orange November light...

The three children find the pumpkin by running past the old one-eyed scarecrow. They take turns carrying the pumpkin to their house - "the little pumpkin liked that" - and then break out their little saw knife. I wasn't quite sure how Brown would describe this, but makes the whole pumpkin-gutting process sound fun. "[T]hey hollowed him out all empty inside, smelling and clean as a whistle." And when the children carve a round eye in the pumpkin's face, the little pumpkin likes it, and laughs again.

"Ho! Ho!"

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