Creepy Carrots, Aaron Reynolds, Peter Brown (illustrator)
I haven’t come across a picture book as fun as this one in quite a while. Creepy Carrots!, is just an enjoyable read. It’s not PC correct, a young rabbit eating healthily (although he’s a bit of carrot gluten) doesn’t get rewarded for doing so. I think that’s great, there’s no what did we learn today kids message on these pages, it’s just plain pure entertainment fun!
The basic plot of this one is a young rabbit named Jasper loves carrots, a heap of them grow in a field near his house and he doesn’t hesitate to rip them from the ground and devour them when on his way to school, sport or back home. However maybe some of these carrots seem to have become as interested in him as he is them. Jasper starts to notice subtle signs of these orange ones in places they shouldn’t be. Sometimes he swears he catches a glimpse of them but when he turns around or gets one of his parents to investigate, they aren’t there. Are they following him? Is he imagining it all? Are these creepy carrots real? If they are, what will they do to him? Jasper doesn’t know, but he’s freaking out something bad! What will he do?
The simple illustrations that fill the pages actually make this story work better than if they were more detailed ones. They stick to different shades of white grey and black with a bit of orange thrown in. The orange gives it both that carroty vibe as well as a bit of a Halloween one, the Halloween one reassures young kids that it’s not going to be more scary than the horror fantasy things that happen around that time of year. Not that this book is set around Halloween by any means, you can certainly read this great creepy (in a child friendly way) tale any time of year.
Sounds like a fun read! Sometimes we can get caught up in “what message does this send kids?” and we forget the real point of getting kids to read is simply to foster a love of books, words, and language. It dosent have to have a good message for it to be a great children’s book!
Hi James, what a great book. I loved reading this. “Jasper whipped around … but nothing. He laughed at himself, picked his toothbrush off the floor, and went to bed … quickly.” It’s really atmospheric; the language (“terrible, carroty breathing”), short sentences, white on dark text, and cool illustrations. The image of Jasper jumping for joy on the third last page is hilarious. The images are very film noir and perfectly enhance the tale.
Without giving too much away, the ending gave me shivers because it reminded me of the 1979 movie “When a Stranger Calls,” which is based on the urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs.” I can’t remember the quote exactly (when the girl realises the creepy phone calls are actually coming from inside the house), but it goes something like “What you lock out, you also lock in.” I remember seeing this movie as a kid, and never got past this line because it freaked me out so much.
I liked that this book doesn’t have a definite moral message as well. If anything it could be a lesson in Gluttony or Greed and the Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe: what you pig-out on will come back to haunt you?
A sequel would be fun.
Overall I got a similar vibe to that of the theme to Richard Matheson’s I am Legend from this one, partcularly the reason Robert Neville was seen as “a legend” by the vampires is the same reason the carrots decide to take action against Jasper in Creepy Carrots. It also is the same dark humour that fans of Gary Larson’s the Far Side cartoons will love.
I agree with Emily, kids need stuff they find interesting and entertaining to form a desire to read books.
I like Katrina’s romanticism of the past, when a serial killer could ring anyone he wanted, even from inside their own house and not only would they not know where he was calling from (although how you wouldn’t hear him speaking into the phone…). Alas callerID is the bane of babysitter serial killers everywhere now, not only does it display the house’s number on the phone’s screen, but if it’s not someone the babysitter knows and wants to talk to, they probably won’t answer the phone at all anyway. Modern technology just makes the old urban legends less fun somehow.
A sequel would be fun, maybe a picture book warning of the dangers of eating nature’s most disgusting vegetable, the onion!