TOO MANY PUMPKINS

When Rebecca Estelle was a little girl, money was scarce. Once for an entire month her family had nothing to eat but pumpkins, so Rebecca Estelle never wants to look at a pumpkin again. Every year while she tends her garden, she simply turns her back on the pumpkin truck as it rumbles by. When a pumpkin falls off the truck into her yard and smashes, she covers it with dirt and tries not to think about it, but by the next year, pumpkin vines have taken root. She resolutely ignores them all summer, but in the fall there are so many pumpkins in her front yard, she can ignore them no longer. Her creative solution makes a fine harvest and Halloween story. White's story features a perfectly plucky individual in Rebecca Estelle, and the detailed line and watercolor illustrations pick up the story and run with it. Lloyd (who illustrated Carolyn Otto's What Color is Camouflage?, p. 1240) gives Rebecca Estelle a fine old brick house with a ramble of garden sheds and chicken coops out back. Esmeralda, the heroine's sidekick cat, provides a particularly expressive counterpoint in almost every picture. (Picture book. 4-8)