![]() Now when I wander through Barnes and Noble I sometimes see the hardcover in the bargain books section during Halloween time. I bought it that day and then I had the author and the title and was able to order some in hard cover. This book was on a cart that I was re-shelving in the I Can Read Book spinners and I happened to flip through it. I started working at Borders Books & Music (R.I.P.) fall of 2005 and started working in the children's section doing inventory and merchandising. I was beginning to think that I made it up. Every Halloween season I would look in bookstores and ask booksellers if they ever heard that story. As an adult I was determined to find it but I didn't remember what it looked like. In middle school and high school I started asking people if they ever read a book with that story in it, or heard of it. The story of the little girl named Jenny with the ribbon around her neck really stuck with me. My kindergarten teacher read this to us Halloween (1989) and I fell in love with it. ![]() This book is hands down one of my favorite children's books. Side note: after reading through it and losing the nostalgia filter, I do think the illustrations in this version make for a better book. While it worked out well for me and my daughter, I highly advise parents to look through this one prior to buying… that said, who knows? Maybe the child is braver than you think. Overall she enjoyed the book and I was pleasantly surprised to not be woken up with screams about ghost pirates or anything throughout the night. Well, bravo child, my hands are tied, time for some scary stories. Apparently she had seen me put it away earlier in the day, pulled it out, looked through all the pictures, and returned it to the bookcase. So, story time hits that night and my daughter tells me "I want the story about the girl whose head falls off." I look at her blankly, wondering what the hell she's talking about and if she's somehow figured out the iPad's code and has been pulling up things on Youtube that she really shouldn't when she runs over to my bookcase and pulls this out. I read through the stories and was delighted to remember them, but the accompanying illustrations, were certainly a bit more than I thought my daughter could take based on her personality and decided perhaps it was better if I hid it for a bit. While I personally love the artwork, I would call it significantly scarier. So yeah, the illustrations were revised in recent years and instead of making them less scary (like that horrible revision of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark which I will not allow in my house because if anyone is reading it they will be as traumatized as I was a kid damn it all) it was made significantly creepier. I went online, ordered it and figured it would be fun to read. The stories weren't particularly scary and the illustrations looked very similar to Halloween decorations I remember from my childhood. ![]() She's also a child who has hid some of my books before because the cover was "too scary and I wanted to make sure it didn't bother anyone." I honestly figured anything remotely scary would not go over well… then I remembered a book I enjoyed as a kid. Mind you, most of the stories I read to her are cheery books with unicorns, talking animals and more than a dash of the color pink. My daughter finds it quite intolerable that I "read scary stories all the time" but that she's not allowed to. ![]()
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