Lean Pickins': Skeleton for Dinner by Margery Cuyler

ONE DAY BIG WITCH AND LITTLE WITCH DECIDED TO BREW A STEW.

BIG WITCH TOOK A TASTE. "THIS IS SOOOOOO YUMMY!" SHE SAID. "LET'S INVITE OUR FRIENDS FOR DINNER!"

Suddenly the two have a mania for a midnight stew brew bash. Their cauldron is already cooking, so all they need is a guest list. Quickly Little Witch jots down the list and pegs it to a nearby tree.

DINNER LIST

GHOST

GHOUL

SKELETON

Big Witch and Little Witch head off into the night to contact their friends, leaving their cauldron simmering amongst the gravestones. And who should come along but Skeleton.

Skeleton notices the bubbling cauldron and then spots the list on the tree.

"ME? DINNER?

I DON'T WANT TO BE EATEN!"

Skeleton rushes off to warn his friends Ghoul and Ghost about the danger of becoming dinner entrees, and their reaction is predictable.

"OOHHH, NOOOOOO!" THEY HOWL.

Needless to say, Big and Little Witch find their proposed dinner guests pretty scarce for a while, but in Margery Cuyler's Skeleton for Dinner (Albert Whitman, 2013), all's well that ends well when this little idiomatic misunderstanding is finally cleared up and Ghost, Ghoul, and Skeleton arrive for dinner bearing a beautiful bouquet of poison ivy for their lovely hostesses. Soup's on!

Margery Cuyler is a veteran writer with many classic holiday picture books on her publications list, and in this delightful little wordplay tale, she is assisted ably by Will Terry, whose sight gags and appealing deep blue-hued illustrations add the appropriate spoofy-spooky ambience and whose witches, ghost, ghoul, and skeleton are safely on the non-scary side for primary readers.

For a pair of holiday storytime treats, pair this new one with Cuyler's top-selling killer-diller rib-tickling skeleton tale, Skeleton Hiccups (see my review here) for a drop-dead good time.

Pull Yourself Together! Bonaparte Falls Apart by Margery Cuyler

BONAPARTE WAS FALLING APART AND THIS REALLY SHOOK HIM UP.

Bonaparte is a little skeleton who has a hard time keeping it together. If he peddles his bike a bit too fast, a foot falls off. If he catches a fast-ball pitch, his baseball glove AND his hand fly off, ball and all. When he takes a big bite of pizza, his jaw actually drops!

"WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN SCHOOL STARTS?

EVERYONE WILL MAKE FUN OF ME!"

It's not like all the kids in Boney's group aren't a bit, er, unusual--Franky Stein, Blacky Widow, and Mummicula are not exactly your average school kids. They try to be helpful, retrieving his boney limbs--when they can find them. But sometimes their playtime turns into a tiresome scavenger hunt for Bonaparte's parts.

Franky offers mechanical assistance, gluing and screwing Boney's legbones back on. But Boney winds up too uptight to move! Blacky offers a protective web to keep it all together, but when Boney tries to play, he and the web turn into a tangle-jangle. Mummicula tries out his skills, but he gets a little over-zealous with the winding wrap and covers Bonaparte's whole skull.

"WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"

Bonaparte knows his constant bone shedding is not going to be cool for school. Even his monster pals are weary with chasing down his body parts. But then Mummicula spots a dog running by with a bone in his mouth and has a brainstorm!

What if the pooch can be trained to retrieve Boneparte's missing parts?

"BONE-ANZA!" SAID BONEPARTE. "YOU ARE MY BONE-A FIDE FRIEND!"

With an, er, "service dog" on the job, Bonaparte's missing parts problem is solved in Margery Cuyler's Bonaparte Falls Apart (Crown Books, 2017). Cuyler is an author well known for her holiday books and funny pun-ditry, plying the power of paronomasia (the fancy word for wordplay) in a witty story great for the first weeks of school and for the upcoming scary season. Fitting in (and fitting together) with classmates is hard to do, but with the appealing illustrations, with Will Terry's blackline drawings set in spot art style on bright white pages, this pair of storytellers manage to make skeletons and little monsters appealing and even charming.

Pair this one with Cuyler's and Terry's clever Skeleton for Dinner (read review here) in which little Skeleton fears that for the witches' dinner, he's wanted to flavor, not savor, the stew.