It’s the spooky season (finally!), and to celebrate our monthly rotating book is The Legend of Glowy Jack! This book is number nine (or ten) in the Big Crow and Little Pumpkin series and takes place during the most fantastic holiday of all: Halloween!
If you know me personally, you will know I’m a MASSIVE fan of Halloween; I have enough plastic pumpkin decorations to prove it and have been passionate about it since the age of seven when I saw Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on VHS* at a friend’s Halloween party.
It left such a deep impression on me, and I was in love with the holiday from that night on. So crazed was I about Halloween that when I discovered a book filled with information on this most mesmerizing time of the year, I didn’t think twice about stealing it from my school’s library. Yes, I confess. I committed crimes; that is how much I adored it.
Incedenlty, I still have the book. See below Exhibit A:
I must have read this book a thousand times, wishing I was a kid living in America and being able to watch the seasons change, the leaves bursting into glorious fireballs of orange, yellow and red, and feel the nights slowly grow colder and longer, and ever so slightly more terrifying.
Curiously, though, the writer of this book, Roderick Hunt, was actually from the UK and was talking about Halloween from a UK perspective, giving the backstory on the origins of many traditions that started in the UK and Ireland and later transplanted to the United States, many of which people still observe to this very day. Except for the wassling parties, at which farmers would get very drunk and go wee all over each other’s orchards. Those have dried up.
But I digress! I do hope you enjoy my book. Oh, and if I can make another book suggestion to anyone who is a fan of Halloween and would like to know more about its origins while also being entertained with a great story, then get a copy of Ray Bradbuy’s The Halloween Tree or better yet, grab the audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot on Audible, it’s all kinds of amazing. And while you’re there, get The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, read by Tom Mison (who played Icabohd in the rather lousy series of the same name.) You won’t regret either purchase.
Thanks for reading, and remember, as you’re walking through your local supermarket and find yourself rolling your eyes at all the cheap plastic pumpkins, the tinsel-covered black cats, and the cardboard cartoon witches as they grin down at you mockingly from overstuffed shelves, don’t, whatever you do, DON’T unbelieve or Jack will get you!
Happy Halloween!
Leigh.
Obake Books 