"His flamboyant art nouveau swirls, the sweeping curls and marble-like sea-foamy flames are gracefully spectacular, and his green, gulping witch quite lives up to Serraillier's description of Grimblegrum as "all willow-gnarled and whiskered head to toe." Most important, his sensuous ostentation is totally in keeping with the dramatic transformations of the Grimm-based story and the compressed, onomotopoetic extravagance of Serraillier's musical verse. The scene can change from the witch's gross candyland villa with its "licorice-beaded door" and "glassy glacier-minted floor" to the pale, almost imperceptible loveliness of two swans (really a boy and girl who have changed themselves to avoid the witch's clutches) gliding "serene and cool" on a "heaven-painted pond" to a tangled, shadowed, thorny thicket in which Grimblegrum dances to a magic flute shrieking "tickle-me-thistle and prickle-de-dee" while the children escape. For those who are fed up with benign cookie-baking witches, Grimblegrum "astride her broom o' beech" or "galloping, gulping 'Gobble you yet, I'll gobble you yet!' " should prove a high-powered Halloween read-aloud." - Kirkus Review, 1973

Ed Emberley is the illustrator and author of over eighty books, including the bestselling Go Away, Big Green Monster! and his enormously popular "Drawing Book series. He has received many awards and accolades, including a Caldecott Honor in 1967 for One Wide River to Cross and a Caldecott Medal in 1968 for Drummer Hoff.

Ian Serraillier (1912–1994) was a renowned English author and poet especially known for his children’s books. His wartime adventure story The Silver Sword (1956) is a beloved classic, and has been adapted twice for television. In 1948, he founded the New Windmill Series for Heinemann Educational Books with his wife, Anne, which he would co-edit for decades.