Jenny Reen and the Jack Muh Lantern - Hardcover

Irene Smalls grew up in Harlem, New York. She graduated with a BA in Black Studies from Cornell University and has a MBA from N.Y.U. She is the author of 18 books about families and they ways they live and love and she and is working on a 12 month picture book series of African-American history tales based on Holidays. Jenny Reen and the Jack Muh Lantern is the 3RD book completed in the series for the month of October. She has three children and lives in BOSTON, Mass.

Kindergarten-Grade 2-While her mother and father work in the cotton fields, Jenny Reen is left with Sister Louisa, the slave-quarter roots woman who tells her stories about Jack Muh Lantern, who terrorizes children on Halloween. The very next day Jenny encounters the creature, but remembers the woman's advice in time to save herself. White uses a variety of intriguing perspectives in his rustic, impressionistic oil paintings, rendered on canvas in vivid colors, thus emphasizing the dramatic elements of the story. Close-up portraits of the characters are expressive but inconsistent, with background figures in fields and groups returning from their labor executed with a minimum of brushstrokes. Jenny Reen seems almost contemporary in her bright red jacket and her mother looks stylish for having spent the day picking cotton, yet the cruelty of slavery is illustrated through details in the text and in Sister Louisa's response to Jenny Reen's question, "...when will I'se be free?" The words and phrases chosen are as colorful as the palette, with the use of dialect reserved for dialogue only. Sources are scrupulously noted and an author's note establishes the context for the story.
Starr LaTronica, Four County Library System, Vestal, NY
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.