Trick or Treat, Alistair Gray by Lindy Ryan

Trick or Treat, Alistair Gray Reviews

• 
  D.K. Hundt

  TRICK-OR-TREAT ALISTAIR GRAY – by Lindy Ryan
  Scheduled Date Of Release — August 16, 2022
  Reading Age — 5 - 7 years
  Grade Level – K - 2
  
  ‘“Halloween is not silly,” /Alistair grumped, / feeling quite wary, / “It’s a time for the dark. / It’s a time to be scary.”’
  
  ‘[W]hen Alistair Gray attends his school Halloween carnival, he is disappointed to see his favorite night of the year has turned more silly than scary—all treats and no tricks. But when he wanders alone into the dark the night before Hallow’s Eve…’
  
  I love the dark, spooky watercolor illustrations throughout this Halloween tale that remind me of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
  
  Recommend!
  
  Thank you, Black Spot Books and Edelweiss, for providing me with an eBook of TRICK-OR-TREAT ALISTAIR GRAY at the request of an honest review.
• 
  Miss Ryoko

  What a fabulous duo Lindy Ryan and Timea Gazdag made to bring this story to life. Lindy's writing was great and Timea's illustrations were absolutely perfect for this story. I loved it! Great job ladies!!
• 
  Brenna Clark

  Thank you so much to Black Spot Books for offering me this eARC in exchange for an honest review, and to Edelweiss for providing me with a copy! I am well past my childhood days and have not had children of my own yet, but these factors did not hinder my enjoyment of Lindy Ryan's spooky prose and Timea Gazdag's haunting illustrations. I'm as much of a lover of Halloween as Alistair is, and often feel his pain once the season arises and the cutesy fall decor of hobby shops overwhelm the scares supplied in Spirit Halloween. It's easy to forget that everyone celebrates differently, and sometimes it takes a lumbering specter with a jack o' lantern for a face to remind you of it.
  
  Alistair is taken aback by the many princesses and fairies roaming the halls of his school's Halloween carnival, and begins to feel stuffy in his mummy attire. He wants the creepy vibes in his heart to be seen and realized on this day that feels like home to him. I relate to his plight; I have always been the 'weird kid' who enjoyed horror movies and gore, and was dressed as a vampire in elementary school for five years while all the girls around me were cheerleaders and humanoid cats. I saw my young self in Alistair, and this is a story that I hope to share with the younger generation to show them that it's okay to be different-- and more than okay to accept everyone else's ways of being.
  
  This tale winds the spine-tingling landscape of a Tim Burton work and the elegiac lyricsms you would expect to find under Lemony Snicket's pen-- making a story that children and adults alike can enjoy. I love the repeating of the phrase "fun AND fright", reminding us all what Halloween... and LIFE... is about. I can't speak enough good things about Alistair, and I will treasure the experience of reading it for a long time to come. Thank goodness it's already August, because I am desperate for October's coming.
• 
  Kathleen Kelly

  Trick or Treat, Alistair Gray by Lindy Ryan is the perfect book for children for the upcoming Halloween holiday! I am a fan of Halloween, probably my favorite holiday. Full of Autumn colors and enough spookiness, keeping in the theme of Halloween, but also a lesson to be learned. While most of love the dark and gloomy colors of the time enough to make a person's spine tingle with fright, this book does not do that.
  Alistair Gray leaves the school carnival, not happy that the carnival doesn't give him the creeps like he was expecting, his walk home he grumbles that Halloween isn't silly, it should be scary!
  
  The story teaches us that Halloween can be spooky but it can also be a lot of fun. This book was very reminiscent of Tim Burton, with the illustrations right on the mark. I think that a child would enjoy this book, of course, having Mom and Dad there to read it with the child, maybe kind of spooky, depending on the age, but again, spookiness can be fun!
  
  I loved it, although I think it would have been better to have the print book in my hands the ebook was good too!
  I give it 5 stars!
• 
  Doreen

  8/13/2022 3.5 stars. Buddy read with Jms. Full review tk at
  TheFrumiousConsortium.net.
  
  9/6/2022 Welp, Labor Day is over, so ofc it's time to turn the consumerist attention to Halloween! (I'm mostly kidding, but also resigned to the world we live in.)
  
  Halloween is such a weird holiday, IMO, less so in its origins than in the way it's evolved over the years as an American (and associated) celebration. I'm one of those earnest weirdos whose favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, tho far, far less as a celebration of colonial survival at the expense of the indigenous than as a holiday focused on gratitude. While I enjoy the dressing up shenanigans of Halloween, I've found that as I get older, I 100% prefer the silly aspects of the holiday to the spooky, perhaps because real life is already scary enough without having to add supernatural fears into the mix.
  
  However, if you have not yet been ground down by mundanity into eschewing the delight of a fearful thrill, then this book is definitely for you! Trick Or Treat, Alistair Gray is about a boy who loves Halloween but is taken aback by how cutesy it has become, with most of the other kids at school using the occasion as a time to dress up as princesses and cowboys instead of the monsters he longs to see. The school's Halloween Ball is one of harvest treats and fall decor, greatly disappointing the mummy-rag-clad boy. Eschewing the safety of the school gym, he heads out into the night, looking for terror... and ultimately finding it.
  
  Given that this is a kid's book, it's not too, too scary -- though Timea Gazdag's illustrations are wonderfully atmospheric and spooky, painted throughout in dark, lush colors reminiscent of gouache. And while Ali does go running out into the dark to find something frightful, what he gets is an age-appropriate explanation for why Halloween is the way it is and why he shouldn't be such a weirdo about letting people celebrate it the way they want to.
  
  Presented in rhyming meter by Lindy Ryan, the story is short but clever, and gentle about reminding kids not to gatekeep but to instead embrace joy while still keeping tradition and history in mind. It strikes a good balance between scary and fun, and is perfect for people who love Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. In fact, this picture book has been turned into an animated short as well, in another family-friendly addition to media you can screen for the upcoming holiday.
  
  My 11 year-old and I read this together. As we're not as goth as Ali is, we both felt the story was pretty good if not in our personal wheelhouses. We both really enjoyed the art tho, and agree that as far as kid's Halloween books go, this is definitely above average. We're just not the target audience that will appreciate this as more than an interesting, if slight read come spooky season. Halloween lovers should absolutely not pass this up tho!
  
  Trick Or Treat, Alistair Gray by Lindy Ryan & Tímea Gazdag was published today September 6 2022 by Black Spot Books and is available from all good booksellers, including
  Bookshop!
• 
  Sandy

  A cute spooky season read about not gatekeeping Halloween. My daughter was not a fan of the rhyming text, but she liked the story and the artwork.
• 
  Syntha Green

  great illustrations
• 
  Heather

  A fun spooky read with excellent artwork!