13 Days of Halloween: Creepy Carrots

words by Aaron Reynolds 
pictures by Peter Brown  
Simon & Schuster 2012 

Jasper Rabbit loves carrots but they're starting to creep him out. Kids everywhere will cheer - they now have a real reason for hating carrots! They're creepy! But is there a deeper message here about the haves and the have-nots? 

Cute Little Jasper loves carrots, and how could he resist the temptation of Crackenhopper Field where they grow fat, crisp, and free? He can't. Then one day his little bunny ears twitch and he is sure he's being followed. Soon enough he is seeing creepy carrots everywhere he looks. The creepy carrots looking at him in the mirror? Those are orange-colored items on the edge of the bathtub. And in the closet? More orange carrot-shaped items.  

But after a week Jasper can't help but see those creepy carrots everywhere he looks. Finally Jasper hatches a plan and spends a Saturday enclosing Crackenhopper Field with a fence, surrounded by a moat full of alligators. There was no way any creepy carrot was ever going to escape and haunt Jasper again. 

And inside the fence the carrots rejoiced. Their plan had worked!  

It's easy to see this as Jasper's story – after all, he's the one being haunted at every turn – but the title of this (literally) dark picture book tells us who the story is really about. These poor, sentient carrots, passive in their existence, have had to deal with the horror of being yanked from the ground and consumed by a bunny with little concern than his own consumption. Is this a story of rabid consumerism? Perhaps, but then would that make the carrots the 99% who haunt in protest for their own rights to exist free of a predatory 1% who think nothing beyond the scope of their own desires.

Reading too much into a picture book again? Maybe the problem is we don't read deep enough.

As haunting as the carrots my be, they are merely creepy as an act of survival, and the ends justify the means as they find themselves in a gated community built on their behalf. That may seem workable for the moment, but how like the social welfare and housing programs of the past where well-intentioned governments (and some ill-intentioned ones as well) construct housing projects and artificial neighborhoods to protect the underclass.

Okay, okay, it's just a story about a rabbit haunted by carrots who are tired of watching kith and kin being eaten before their very carrot eyes. The illustrations in black, grey, and orange deliberately play off the Halloween theme of horror, a little trick-and-treat mixture of cute and creepy. The young'uns will eat it up, but not like carrots. More like candy corn I'd say.

Superhero School

by Aaron Reynolds
illustrated by Andy Rash
Bloomsbury 2009

Leonard is excited to hear that his parents have signed him up for superhero school. After all, he has all the necessary superpowers like super strength and heat vision, and regular school was no place for him. But superhero school is full of math. Was there ever anything to drain a superhero of his strength faster than boring old mathematics?

But one day Leonard and his schoolmates arrive to find that ice zombies have seized the school and taken their teachers hostage. Its up to Leonard and his classmates – and the casual application of math – to save the day. And from that day forward Leonard never viewed math as a chore.

As tired as I am of superheroes in children's books – and I still have yet to be convinced this is a genre kids actually seek out – the blending here of math and superheroes is a slight step above the usual hero adventure. The math portions of the story aren't quite so didactic that they would turn off a reader; if anything, they could easily slip past a reader until the very end where the math portions are spelled out, and even then they can be easily glossed over. It seems doubtful to me that the picture book reader this book is intended for would have an awareness of operations like fractions and division, but it's all very simple, very benign.

On the art side of the equation, Rash's sharp and bold-outlined illustrations have just the right feel. Total geek that I am, I really like one spread in particular where images were overprinted to indicate invisibility and the reflections in a window. Whether this was part of his digital collage work or part of the printing process I don't know, but it's a nifty effect that caught my attention. I don't know how else it could be employed, but I'd like to see more of these sort of experiments in illustration.