Customer Reviews

Scared Silly!: A Halloween Book for the Brave (An Arthur Adventure)

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This was a book of children's poems about things that little kids are scared of. It takes those fears and turns them into funny things for children to read. This book took a collection of poems and short story about things that many people think about around Halloween. It talks about things like goblins and scary things lurking around in the dark. This is a book that children can read and laughs about things that they think are scary.
I like this book because it gives children a way to read about things that they think are scary and realize that maybe those things aren't so scary after all. If you can get a child to laugh about something that they thought was scary then they may just be able to keep laughing about it instead of letting it frighten them. I think the person who compiled these poems and short stories into this book for child to enjoy really wanted the children to be able to laugh about these things. Many children have fears of things that can't really hurt them and this allows them to see that and laugh about it.

These poems are great read-alouds. My 7-year-old daughter loves to hear them read and to read them herself. This book has inspired me to buy more children's poetry books. We especially love the poem "The Adventures of Isabel." This should be required reading for all little girls. My daughter, who hates and fears her second-grade teacher, was inspired and strengthened by this poem. I know we will read this book many times for a long time to come.

This is a reprint of a book originally published in 1994. It's a fun collection of mostly poetry with a few short stories, riddles, jokes and even a song thrown in. The entries were written by a variety of well-known children's authors and colorfully illustrated by Marc Brown (who is best known for his "Arthur" books).

The collection is about "scary" things such as witches, monsters, ghosts, and more, although most of the entries are humorous rather than frightening. A few of the poems deliver just enough menace to give a child some delighted shivers.

It's a good book for young children who aren't yet ready for really scary stories, and a great collection for parents or teachers looking for a little extra something to liven up a Halloween storytime for the young ones.

This book is lots of fun! It would be great to read at Halloween. It could even possibly help a child who is scared of monsters in their room. It has a short story of a little girl who takes charge of messy monsters! The jokes are cute and the "Tomb of Gloom" game was a game I played as a child and was happy to see it in there!

This is an excellent collection of poems and rhymes edited and illustrated by that friendly aardvark Arthur's creator Marc Brown. The drawings are in the same style as the Arthur stories and some of Arthur's friends even make appearances lightening the mood even more from scary to silly. The ominous looking but genial Binky Barnes stars in an especially cute poem. My favorite nightmare defeating rhyme "The Adventures of Isabel" by Ogden Nash is included and makes a great read aloud as does the entire book.

Marc Brown's Scared Silly! features many scary poems, riddles, jokes and stories. They are by many different authors that each tells about a scary story and about how they deal with those. Scared Silly is filled with many bright and bold colors throughout the book. This coloration undermines the scariness of the book, and offers comfort to a child reading these stories. Another aspect that takes away from the book being scary is the stories themselves. The selections portray the characters as comedic. This also makes light of the fact that the book is supposed to scare little children. One of the stories called "One Hungry Monster" by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe tells of a common fear young children have. It is about monsters underneath a little girl's bed and roaming around her house. They demand food from her and mess up her house. This would normally terrify a young child, but Marc Brown offers relief trough his pictures, colors, and the outcome of the story. The illustrations on the pages of "One Hungry Monster" are very bright and colorful. They also portray the monsters as silly, with wide eyes and their tongues sticking out. An article from Time Warner Bookmark about Scared Silly says, "Marc Brown has collected an array of lovable ghosts, ghouls, and witches, not to mention a pack of deliciously horrid monsters and a parcel of cowardly bullies." When the girl gives them the food, they play with it and put it all over themselves. The end of the story offers comfort as well. Instead of the girl being scared and running away, she told the monsters that she was disappointed because they left her house in a mess. It says that the "ten sorry monsters" disappear back into the chimney. They also have sad looks on their faces, knowing they had been defeated. These things help a young reader cope with a common fear by dealing with it in a comedic manner. This way of coping with scary things seems to be what Marc Brown was going for when he wrote this book. Another story in which the comedy overshadows the scariness of this book is "Witches Four" by Marc Brown. Witches are normally scary things for a child to imagine. They have always been associated with being mean and scary. In this story, Marc Brown conveys a group of four witches doing everyday things like brushing their teeth, eating, washing their faces, and getting dressed. The illustrators show the witches as old with glasses and gray hair. They look like grandmothers, which makes them likeable. Like the other stories, this one is also filled with many bright and bold colors. The witches are smiling on the pages as well. By the time the story says that the witches are "dressed for spooking," Marc Brown has taken away the scary stereotype of a witch. The stories, poems, riddles, and jokes in Scared Silly are meant to downplay the fact that witches, monsters, sea creatures, and old people are sometimes scary to small children. An article from Time Warner Bookmark says that Scared Silly is "a collection of poems and stories designed to help young readers scale their fears down to size by laughing out loud at the things that make them scared silly." Marc Brown and the other authors use bright colors and comedic characters to offer another perspective of things that normally carry a negative stereotype.