cover image Working Mummies

Working Mummies

Joan Horton, illus. by Drazen Kozjan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $12.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-374-38524-8

Horton keeps up the momentum behind the pun in her title with smooth, four-line verses in this vividly illustrated guide to “mummy” professions. A mummy doctor “checks the throats/ Of spooks with raspy moans,/ Then doses them with coffin syrup/ To soothe their frightful groans.” A six-armed mummy realtor doesn’t shy from selling haunted houses, and mummy caterers deliver plates of eyeballs and worms to a gathering of “drooling beasts.” Kozjan delivers a menagerie of monsters and cadaverous creatures, rendered in fluorescent fuchsia, orange, and green, with originality and scares on every page. Ages 3–up. Illustrator’s agent: Holly McGhee, Pippin Properties. (July)