Best Witches: Poems for Halloween

While I enjoyed reading this collection of poetry more than others by Jane Yolen, I am still annoyed with the inconsistency between poems. Some are wonderfully clever, others are surprisingly deep, but some are just awkward. Several of the poems were the sort that I want to share with students for

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the depth and thematic message. Perhaps I just need to look at the "silly" ones again to gain a better appreciation for Yolen's work.

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Personally, I was more interested in the illustrations than the poems. The pictures were very detailed and colorful, I loved them. The poems were clever, but since there were twenty one of them, they got old. I used to love books about witches when I was a child, so that's why I picked it up. The

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language in it was a little difficult and pretty long. I would think it's on a 5th or 6th grade level. The book didn't just have one plot, each poem was different. It was definitely creative though, so that's what I liked about it. I didn't like how the poems lost my attention easily.

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Grade:3-6
Poetry
Best Witches is a collective poem book with many different topics dealing with Halloween. There is a poem called "The Magic House", "Witch Pizza", "MAgic Wands", and even "The Warlocks cat". Most of the poems making up are short, less than a page, but the vocabulary and figurative

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language made it more suited for older students than younger. Younger students may have difficulty understanding a majority of the poems. The book is illustrated beautifully, and each poem has its own unique illustrations to match it. What I really liked about the book is that most of the poems were humorous instead of scary. Overall I enjoyed many of the poems from this book, and think it is a good Halloween read.

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This is a collection of poems about Halloween. They are fun poems to get children excited for Halloween.

Twenty-one witchy poems from author Jane Yolen are paired with colorful, humorous artwork from illustrator Elise Primavera in this Halloween picture-book. From The Magic House, which offers an examination of the Hansel and Gretel story, to Do Witches Have?, which asks whether witches have babies,

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the selections here deal with witches in many circumstances, from traditional to modern...

Having enjoyed many books from both Yolen and Primavera, I was excited to track down Best Witches: Poems for Halloween. On the whole, I enjoyed it, although I thought the illustrations were far stronger than the text. The artwork was immensely appealing, managing to be both magical and humorous, with so many entertaining little details. I liked the idea of many of the poems, but often found them a little awkward in execution. I can only think of one poem I thought was quite good, The Warlock's Cat, which reads:

"A shadow of a shadow
Slipping in and out of night,
With his claws and teeth like starshine
Flickering on the edge of sight.

He is blacker than a night wind,
He is darker than a coal,
For he's the outward casting
Of his fearsome master's soul."

This was probably the best of the lot, with striking imagery, a smooth execution, and a fascinating central idea (the cat as familiar). Tastes vary of course, so I'd still recommend this one to readers looking for collections of Halloween poetry for children. For my part, my stars are mostly for the ideas and images here, rather than the writing.

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