Los Gatos Black on Halloween

Los Gatos Black on Halloween

Montes, M. (2006). Los gatos black on Halloween. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

 Genre: Children’s Fiction

Age Level: 4-Up

Summary: This children’s picture book is a story about many types of monsters that come to life on Halloween night and join in a monstrous ball that is soon interrupted by a true horror.  This book of fantasy includes many elements that we still use in books and movies today. The story includes flying witches, skeletons, ghosts, zombies, vampires and several other conventional Halloween characters that all go parading through the town and graveyard and eventually reach a haunted mansion where they engage in a night of well-mannered frivolity.

Reflection: This book has received the Pura Belpre award which is named after Pura Belpre, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. The Pura Belpre Award, established in 1996, is presented annually to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth. This story is an easy to read, rhyming text about Halloween night that incorporates Spanish words and vocabulary.  The rhyming helps the sentences flow very easily and helps the reader keep on pace. This book would work great in helping teach Spanish to English speaking students and vice versa because after the Spanish word is read, the English version is read within the same sentence or immediately in the next line. The illustrations are very colorful showing that this book is fun and not at all supposed to scare the reader.