An adorably large-eyed bat swoops through the night eating bugs. Rhyming text gives way to surprisingly informative back matter, including lots of bat facts ("if you hate bug bites, you should love bats"). Cute! Great choice for a Halloween storytime. ( )

A cute little bat wakes up on Halloween night in this rhyming picture-book treat, and enjoys a smorgasbord of bug delights. Munching his way through moths, flies, crickets, beetles, and bees, the bat uses echolocation, and flies through the night. The book closes with a few pages of information about bats - their diet (bugs, obviously), the different kinds, their anatomy - and closes with an admonition to the child reader not to fear bats, if they encounter them on Halloween night...

An appealing mixture of fictional and nonfictional elements, Trick or Treat, Bugs to Eat is one Halloween book that manages to be both entertaining and educational. I liked the fact that author Tracy C. Gold took one of the classic creatures of Halloween and explored its own nighttime "trick or treating" experiences, in a non-anthropomorphic, biological way. The accompanying artwork from Nancy Leschnikoff is colorful and cute. With a fun rhyming text and eye-catching illustrations, this would make an excellent seasonal title for younger children, and could be used both in a more general Halloween story time, or in a teaching unit on nocturnal species like bats. ( )