Anne Mangan (text), David Cornish (illus), Emu’s Halloween, HarperCollins, 1 September 2015, 32pp., $14.99 (hbk) ISBN 9780732298906
If your kids are itching to go trick-or-treating, but you’d really rather they didn’t, here’s a book to help you convince them to have a Halloween party instead. In Emu’s Halloween, Victorian author Anne Mangan takes the American traditions associated with Halloween and gives them an Australian spin, featuring iconic Aussie animals like the kangaroo and emu, alongside the infamous redback spider.
The story is written as a rhyme, with mostly one to two sentences a page. It tells the tale of Emu’s struggle to throw a party for October 31 that is truly scary. Emu’s friends rally around him and they work together to prepare frightful decorations and fearsome food. There’s humour too, with an echidna assigned to blow up the balloons. The book provides inspiration for scary costumes, with the echidna dressed as Dracula, a koala as Frankenstein’s monster, a cockatoo as a ghost, and – my favourite – a redback spider as himself.
South Australian illustrator David Cornish’s pictures are big, bold and fun and his “zombie kangaroo” really looks like a zombie!
I read this with my son, 2, and my 7-year-old twin girls and (thankfully) no-one was scared.
I didn’t love this book. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, it just seemed a bit “ho hum”. My kids didn’t want to read it a second time either.
Reviewed by Carissa Mason