Bryan_Carey's Full Review: Cynthia Rylant - Moonlight: The Halloween Cat
Halloween is a special day designed with children in mind. Kids get to dress up like their favorite characters, scare other people, and walk from house to house seeking out candy and other treats. But Halloween is also special for others and one of them happens to be a cat named Moonlight. In this book, Moonlight: The Halloween Cat, author Cynthia Rylant and illustrator Melissa Sweet join together to produce a children's book about a black cat who loves Halloween.
Basic Contents of This Book:
Moonlight is a black cat who loves the night time. She loves walking around during the dark of night, camoflaged from view due to her dark fur. She likes all nights, but Halloween night is her favorite night of all. She likes the way the jack-o-lanterns seem to smile at her. She likes the straw figures on porches because they are so nice to lie down on. She also loves the children and likes to follow them as they walk from house to house, dressed in their customes, looking for tricks and treats.
Moonlight enjoys watching the moon on this most special of nights and she likes watching the other animals, too. She also likes that treats are sometimes dropped by children, and many of these treats are just the right size for a cat to grab and enjoy. Final Thoughts: Halloween is a fun time of year for children and the subject of Halloween is often the topic of many fictional works, including books, movies, and the like. Halloween books, like Halloween movies, are usually either horror in nature or are aimed at children. Most Halloween books are made with kids in mind and Moonlight: The Halloween Cat is one of hundreds of titles aimed at this young audience.
Children's Halloween books usually avoid the scary stuff and stick with more benign themes. Moonlight: The Halloween Cat is no different. It offers a walk around a neighborhood from the perspective of a black cat who loves the night and adores the night of Halloween most of all. The black cat likes watching the children as they wander from house to house in their costumes and she likes all of the great decorations associated with this time of the year.
Moonlight: The Halloween Cat is a little different from other childrens books and some of the differences could make this book a little less desireable for certain children. One fact that is different is the book's words. There are very few words on the book's thirty pages and there is no rhyming pattern or rhythm. The words are like those of a narrator, describing the things that a black cat likes about the night. The words are a little on the dull side, but they do invoke a cozy, warm feeling that is often associated with the Halloween season as a time for friendship.
The words contained on the pages of Moonlight: The Halloween Cat might not say much, but what does get the reader's attention are the illustrations. They are paintings and they feature many different animals. They also feature a dark blue sky with twinkling stars, homes with soft, flashing lights, and a warm glow that seems to permeate everything. These illustrations put the reader in a specific frame of mind that fits well with the Halloween season, minus the scary parts.
Moonlight: The Halloween Cat doesn't offer any strong messages for children and it doesn't offer a strong ending. It does, however, offer a simple read that will be most enjoyed by children in the four to six age bracket. The illustrations are the books strongest point and while the words could easily be improved, the book as a whole has enough to offer to earn it a slight recommendation.
Softly padding through the darkness, Moonlight explores the world on her favorite night, Halloween. Told in simple, lyrical words with luminous painti...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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