Do you dare to cross paths with ...

An enchantress who can slip in and out of her skin, A man more evil than the devil, A skull who talks back, A pair of creepy feet that can walk on their own?

Spooky, chilling, and fantastical, this collection of six scary tales will send shivers up your spine!

The stories in the skull talks back have been selected from Every Tongue Got To Confess, Zora Neale Hurston's third volume of folklore. Through Joyce Carol Thomas's carefully adapted text and Leonard Jenkins's arresting illustrations, the soulful, fanciful imaginations of ordinary folk will reach readers of all ages. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Gr 4-6-Thomas retells six supernatural folktales selected from Hurston's Every Tongue Got to Confess (HarperCollins, 2001). The subject matter is sufficiently scary to give young readers a thrill, and Jenkins's spooky black-and-white paintings of skeletons, skulls, arrogant men, eerie cats, and nighttime swirls of fog perfectly set the stage for shivers. Thomas omits most of the dialect and supplies missing motivation. In "The Witch Who Could Slip off Her Skin," the reteller adds silly explanatory paragraphs telling why this witch would "ride" people who had done her wrong. She eliminates the character of "Marster" from "Big Sixteen," here called "Big, Bad Sixteen." "Bill, the Talking Mule," a tale in which a farmer is frightened when his animals suddenly speak to him, retains all of the surprise hilarity of the original. An adapter's note doesn't explain the changes so much as review the content. Although mostly faithful to Hurston's tales, the retellings read like fragments from some larger work that begin in the middle and end abruptly, a fact that may trouble readers who expect more shape to a story. However, this volume introduces a small part of the huge body of literature collected in the rural South in the 1920s and the person who helped put words to paper.-Susan Hepler, Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr. 4-7. Hurston was a landmark writer and collector of black folklore in the 1930s rural South, but her stories, written in heavy dialect, are not accessible to kids. Using a direct style that loses none of the colloquial immediacy of the original voices, Thomas has done a great job of retelling six of Hurston's supernatural tales, and Jenkins' monochromatic collages and silhouettes capture the delicious, shivery glow of skeletons and graveyards. Thomas' retelling about "the witch who could slip off her skin" is not as dramatic as Virginia Hamilton's in Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny 0 BKL Je 1 & 15 04, but the tales in this small, spacious collection will still be favorites with storytellers. Best of all is "Big Bad Sixteen" about a man so strong that he kills the devil. When the man dies, he can't enter either heaven or hell, so he returns to Earth as the scary jack-o-lantern. Thomas provides brief, lively notes at the end. Let's hope she'll bring more of Hurston's work to thrill young readers. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2004 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1901 in Eatonville, Fla. She left home at the age of 17, finished high school in Baltimore, and went on to study at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University before becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Harlem Renaissance.

Her works included novels, essays, plays, and studies in folklore and anthropology. Her most productive years were the 1930s and early 1940s. It was during those years that she wrote her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, worked with the Federal Writers Project in Florida, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and wrote four novels. She is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937.

She died penniless and in obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, her grave was rediscovered and marked and her novels and autobiography have since been reprinted.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.