The Widow’s Broom

Written and Illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg

Houghton Mifflin, 1992

Witches’ brooms don’t last forever.  They grow old, and even the best of them, one day, lose the power of flight.

Eek!  It’s a:  Witch!  (Actually, it’s mostly a witch’s broom…)

I wonder if there are any witches out there who have upgraded to Swiffers?

This book really isn’t directly about the witch, but it still has a dark and eerie feel to it that makes it a great read during Halloween season.  It begins with a witch falling from the sky into the vegetable garden of widow Minna Shaw.  When the witch recovers, she flies away with a fellow witch and leaves her broom behind.  The broom begins doing chores in Minna Shaw’s house and can even play piano.  She is delighted, but her neighbors are suspicious of the broom and believe it to be evil.  One day, two neighbor boys bully the broom and when it fights back, the villagers insist on destroying it.

Clearly, there are a lot of parallels here to the Salem witch trials of the 1600s, especially when the angry mob ties the broom to a stake and burns it.  The story’s dark overtones are especially present in author/illustrator Chris Van Allsburg’s gorgeous artwork.  As in The Z was Zapped, the artwork is done in monochromatic pencil and is stunning in its detail and shading.  Additionally, the illustrations often don’t show the whole picture here, which adds to the mysterious feeling of the story (and is a nice nod to the narrow-mindedness of the villagers, who aren’t seeing the whole picture when it comes to their fear of the broom.)

If you are a longtime fan of Mr. Van Allsburg, then you probably already know that he includes a bull terrier (named Fritz) in most of his books, modeled after his brother-in-law’s dog.  Fritz appears here as the dog of the kids that tease the broom, and he gets a little comeuppance of his own when the boys send him to attack it.  But don’t feel too bad for the broom, folks.  Minna Shaw is a bit of a trickster and you’ll see that she’s done some quick thinking and outsmarted the villagers, so the book ends happily.

And what did we learn?  What I take away from this book is that not understanding something is not a good reason to hate or fear it.