The idea of Papa Bear going out into the woods in the middle of the night to scare his own cubs is maybe a little over the top. It's all in good fun, apparently, but I can imagine the more real life version where this completely backfires on him horribly. The cubs are scarred for life, Scout Leader Jane is furious, and Mama Bear is even madder. The book doesn't go there, though, because they're just leaning into that Papa Bear mischievousness and his fondness for scary things, which we've seen in plenty of other books, so it's not necessarily out of character. This is Papa at his most mischievous.
It's a pretty short book, about a five or six minute read, and there are no overlong sections. The Bear Scouts (Brother, Sister, and Cousin Fred) are heading into the great spooky forest for an overnight with Scout Leader Jane, and they make it very clear on page one that they'd prefer Papa not come along. Papa responds by warning them about spooks, a nightly parade of them, with the Ghost of the Wood as the boss of them all. Mama overhears, tells the Scouts he's just trying to give them a scare, and sends them off.
The Opening Rhyme
Not bad. Not great either. In a book where everything rhymes, it's hard to make the poem anything special.
The second the Scouts wave goodbye, Papa sneaks up to the attic rag box, cuts three holes in a sheet, and turns himself into a ghost with bare feet. The book calls him a sly old fox. You can see all of this coming from the very first spread, where he's hiding underneath the stairs with a mischievous grin while the Scouts tiptoe past.
The Title Page
The forest looks like it absolutely wants to devour the cubs and teacher Jane, and if my kids weren't afraid of sleeping in the forest before seeing this, they definitely will be now.
While the Scouts set up camp, Jane's off collecting leaves and studying seeds when she hears Papa chuckling and talking to himself in the weeds, and she decides this is a game that two can play. Using twigs and leaves as a base, she starts building what looks like a face. So when the "ghost of the forest" shows up that night and frightens those Scouts from their heads to their toes, a spookier spook comes into sight right behind him and gives the first ghost a terrible fright.
Papa Bear is clearly up to no good.
Then there's spook number three. Sister opens an eye and takes a good look: a yellow hat, a pumpkin head, Papa's red pajamas, and a polka dot dress that looks exactly like Mama's. Usually Mama would be the one who swoops in and says "what are you doing, Papa? You shouldn't be scaring the cubs like that." Instead, she matches him and catches them all off guard. We don't see a lot of those moments from Mama, where she breaks from that typical "I know best, I'll be the adult in the room" role, and I actually kind of like it. There's no stern talking-to at the end. We just get this prank, because teaching Papa a lesson like this was too good a chance to miss. If it's your first time reading it, you wouldn't see the twist coming; it was actually pretty well hidden. The cubs get this nice arc of wanting to go out on their own, being a little afraid, and then getting to be in on the joke, and when I read it my kids are always glued. Some of that is obviously the rhyming scheme, which is done really well.
A moral slapped on at the end
On the outset, this book doesn't really have a moral to it. If you pick one out starting from the end and working backwards, it's essentially "don't be afraid of ghosts." They almost just say it outright: Jane calls it a "double ghost lesson," there are no such things and never have been, but it's fun to be scared of them anyway. The problem is they don't set that up throughout the book. The bears signal they're a little afraid, sure, but it never feels like the central tension, and I don't think a kid comes out of this any less afraid of ghosts. They aren't given any tools for handling it. If anything, they're going to be frightened to camp out at night because their parents might come out and try to scare them.
If you try to pick out the moral from the beginning forward instead, it's almost more independence driven. The Scouts going off for a night with Scout Leader Jane, no parents, using their scout skills to raise the tent, fill the lamp, and get the fire lit. Maybe some of Jane's approval of Papa staying home is that he's a troublemaker and she's worried he'll derail the trip, and maybe some of it is just wanting the cubs to have a night on their own. Either way, this isn't a book I pick out for any particular moral. It doesn't come out because my kids are afraid of the dark or because they're about to spend a night away from us; there are other Berenstain Bears books that fit those situations much better (The Berenstain Bears Afraid of the Dark for the first, The Berenstain Bears and the Sitter for the second, and I'll get to both eventually). This one gets pulled out for fun, for the rhyme, and because the story is pretty interesting. The lesson at the end reads like they felt obliged to slap one on because it's a Berenstain Bears book, as opposed to just admitting they wrote this one for fun. On the lesson alone, it's a one out of five.
Spooks a kid can laugh at
The illustrations are very, very good for the most part, and they have to be. Because of the rhyming scheme, the text is a lot less descriptive than in other books in the series, so the pictures play a pretty central role in showing what the characters are thinking and which ones are talking. We're also given a few pieces of very kid-friendly eye candy with the mock-ups of the "spooks." The Berenstains always do a great job there, making something that's fun to look at without being overtly scary, and that's a real needle to thread. Tackle a topic like ghosts head on and you can have the reverse effect and actually make somebody more afraid of it. These are clearly ghosts, but they're interesting for a kid to study, and they can almost laugh at them.
My kids have collectively decided that the small green and yellow "spook" is the scariest of the bunch.
Then along the way we get the full range of expressions, starting with the cubs looking really upset as they head into the woods, worried about what Papa said.
Scout Leader Jane looks really proud of herself after discovering Papa in the weeds, and at the very end Mama has that "oops, I was a little naughty" look on her face while the cubs kind of enjoy it and Papa and Jane stand there stunned by the whole thing. Good looking spooks, and some really great faces from all of the bears, honestly. Given that the rhymes can't carry heavy descriptive text, the illustrations end up adding more to the story themselves.
On the rhyming
This is one of the only books we own that follows a rhyming scheme all the way through; we have this one and a Christmas one that rhymes essentially throughout. I definitely like it. They're actually pretty good at writing the rhymes and it flows off the tongue really well. There are a few spots that come across a little awkward, where they're trying to squeeze some plot into the rhyme, but with a few practice reads I've gotten better at hitting the rhythm they intended. My kids seem pretty interested in any book that rhymes, so this one matches that really well. I also find it funny that the book says "spooks" instead of ghosts the whole way through. It was published in 1988, so maybe that was just a more popular word back then, or maybe it's an easier word to rhyme. Either way I get a kick out of it.
Papa Bear sneaks into the woods at night to spook his own cubs in The Berenstain Bears and the Ghost of the Forest by Stan and Jan Berenstain (1988), a rhyming picture book for ages 4-8. Scout Leader Jane out-pranks him with a twig-and-leaf face, then Mama shows up as spook number three, a twist that lands. The moral feels tacked on; really it is a prank story that runs five or six minutes aloud. Three stars, worth it for kids who lock in for rhymes and enjoy Papa getting his due.
