Haunted Book Review Thursday

Country Living: Happy Halloween

Bewitching Parties and recipes, enchanting pumpkins and decorations, plus lots of other spine-tingling ideas

For those who know me by now know that I try to be a gentleman.  A crazed demented insane shell of a man but a gentleman nonetheless.  Therefore I will first of all praise the finer points of this book:

• The cover is absolutely wonderful, the die-cut cat is unique and striking (uh oh, he's gonna make this one nasty)
• The photography is par for the course with Country Living's quality, beautifully illustrated, lavish color photographs adorn every page (Aaaand here's the windup.....)
• The directions to the projects are simple to follow and involve readily available materials that don't involve a lot of time and money (And here's the pitch.....)

And that's all the nice things I have to say.  Now for the fun part:
I feel that I have been betrayed by the editors of Country Living.  I have many past issues of their October Halloween issues and have never been disappointed.  There has always been a rustic charm and old fashioned feeling of the warmth of Halloweens past with projects from past issues that are noticeably absent in this one.  The first quarter of the book was spent on Jack O' Lantern carving, with nothing that I haven't seen before elsewhere (I'm also a traditionalist when it comes to Jack O' Lanterns, I only carve faces but that's just me).  The second quarter is the crafts section and I really didn't see anything that was remotely original.  Then we come to three-eights of the book which is recipes.  I collect cookbooks also but didn't see anything overtly original or strikingly different about their Halloween dining menus.  The last eighth is kid's costumes.  They're cute, easy to do and there's some great patterns that can be used included.  However, like the kids in Martha's Halloween book, your kids are not about to be Red Riding Hood (unless torn fishnets and 29 hole Doc Marrtens are involved with makeup from Spencers), they're going to want to be %$#@&!!!  HANNAH MONTANA, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL KIDS OR ANYTHING ELSE SO UNHALLOWEENY IT MAKES ME WEEP IN MY SLEEP!!!  Unless they're going to go as someone from Twilight in which you're going to have to wash the clothes, bathtub and towels four times to get rid of all the glitter that's going to be stuck to it.

But I digress.

This book was shrink wrapped when I bought it, otherwise I wouldn't have if I would have seen it first.  I was terribly disappointed that it ran along the lines of Better Homes and Gardens instead of the caliper that I was used to from Country Living magazine.  But you get a year's free subscription to Country Living free with purchase but I lost my receipt so that's out.(Strrrrrrriiiiiike!)

In short...save the $17.95.  Spend it on something else that you might use for Halloween, like 10 or 15 bags of those little candy corn pumpkins that I can't eat enough of, and candy corn, the traditional stuff, not any of that hoidy toidy gourmet crap.  What?  Am I the only person that eats this stuff?   And Smarties (loves me some Smarties too!).

Don't look at me that way, I told you that I was weird.