Araminta Spookie: My Haunted House

Title:  Araminta Spookie:  My Haunted House
Author:  Angie Sage
Publisher:  Katherine Teegan Books
Year: 2006
Pages:  132
Genre:  Fantasy, Ghost Story
Theme:  Home, Family
Age Range:  2nd-5th Grade

Summary: 
Araminta is a little girl who loves her home.  She lives with her Aunt Tabby and her Uncle Drac in a huge, spooky house.  Araminta spends most of her time ghost hunting.  A house as large and creepy as hers must surely come with a few spirits.  But her Aunt Tabby has had enough of the old place, and she lists the house for sale.  Araminta manages to scare away every prospective buyer, until a the Wizzard family turns up.  With the help of two actual ghosts, Araminta pull out all the stops-but will she be able to save her beloved home?

Review:
If you're looking for a creepy, spooky ghost story, this is not the book for you.  However, if you are looking for a ghost story with a quirky main character and the friendliest ghosts since Casper, then My Haunted House just might fit the bill.  Araminta narrates the story, and she is definitely no shy, retiring girl.  She has a spirit as big as her house, and she's certainly not afraid to say what she thinks, or fight for what she thinks is right.  The other characters are all take-offs of movie monsters.  Aunt Tabby is constantly fighting with the boiler, leaving her covered in soot and flying around with a broom-sweeping up the mess, of course.  Her Uncle Drac keeps bats in a tower as pets, works nights, and sleeps in a sleeping bag suspended from the ceiling.  And the Wizzards end up, being, well, wizards.  Araminta's love of her home could lead to some interesting discussions with students, but mostly I think this book makes a decent addition to a classroom library.

All the Lovely Bad Ones, by Mary Downing Hahn

Title:  All the Lovely Bad Ones
Author:  Mary Downing Hahn
Publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year:  2008
Pages:  192
Genre:  Ghost Story, Fantasy
Themes:  Redemption
Age Range:  4th-7th Grade


Summary:  from Goodreads

Travis and his sister, Corey, can’t resist a good trick—so when they learn that their grandmother’s sleepy Vermont inn has a history of ghost sightings, they decide to do a little "haunting" of their own. Scaring the guests proves to be great fun, and before long, the inn is filled with tourists and ghost hunters eager for a glimpse of the supernatural.But Travis and Corey soon find out that they aren’t the only ghosts at Fox Hill Inn. Their thoughtless games have awakened something dangerous, something that should have stayed asleep. Restless, spiteful spirits swarm the inn, while a dark and terrifying presence stalks the halls and the old oak grove on the inn’s grounds. To lay the ghosts to rest, Travis and Corey must first discover the dark history of Fox Hill and the horrors visited on its inhabitants years earlier.

Review:
Mary Downing Hahn knows how to write a ghost story.  This book is a good, old-fashioned scare-fest, at least for the middle grade set.   It's got everything-cold spots, lights that turn on and off by themselves, mysterious flying objects, all taking place in an old house in Vermont.  The fact that Travis and Corey also learn a valuable lesson about the way they treat people is icing.  And make no mistake-this story is scary.  Too scary for immature readers who are still figuring out the difference between reality and fantasy.  If a child still believes in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, then this book is not for them.  But for slightly older readers who like to be scared, this book is a good choice.

Dying to Meet You: 43 Old Cemetery Road #1

Title:  Dying to Meet You:  43 Old Cemetery Road #1

Author:  Kate Klise
Publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year:  2009
Pages:  155
Genre:  Fantasy, Ghost Story
Themes:  Family, Friendship
Age Range:  2nd-4th Grade


Summary:  from Goodreads

The best-selling author Ignatius B. Grumply moves into the Victorian mansion at 43 Old Cemetery Road, hoping to find some peace and quiet so that he can crack a wicked case of writer's block. 
But 43 Old Cemetery Road is already occupied--by an eleven-year-old boy named Seymour, his cat, Shadow, and an irritable ghost named Olive. 
And they have no intention of sharing!

Review:
As ghost stories go, this one is not exactly going to make anyone check under their bed or in their closet before turning off the lights at night.  Olive is really a very nice ghost, in a sort of Mary Poppins/Nanny McPhee sort of way.  She is proper and smart and caring of Seymour in a serious, no-nonsense sort of way.  There is nothing here that could actually scare a younger reader-but unfortunately I'm not sure there's much here to attract them, either.

The problem as I see it is two-fold.  First, the story unfolds very quickly, with very little exposition about the characters or the motivations for their actions.  Each character felt flat to me-the grumpy writer, the abandoned boy, and the irritated ghost-and when they changed it happened in a snap, with very little actual development.  The other problem, which I see as more troublesome, is that while the book is obviously supposed to appeal to younger readers, the plays-on words and wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments that make it funny are not things that younger readers will necessarily get.  Anyone who has spent time with 5-10 year olds knows that their idea of humor is fairly unsophisticated.  Think of the incessant knock-knock jokes and silly riddles they love.  All of the characters names are puns, which younger readers might appreciate-if they were puns that they understood.  I'm not sure that E. Gadds or Anita Sale will be immediately recognizable to the age range I think this book is designed for.

However, there is one thing that makes this book worth having around a classroom, and that is the narrative structure.  This is an epistolary novel, meaning that it is told through a series of letters between the various characters, as well as drawings doe by "Seymour" and newspaper articles from a fictitious newspaper.  Epistolary novels seem to have been more popular lately in the adult publishing world, and any exposure to different narrative structures can only help students be better readers and writers.  Were I to use this in the classroom, I might actually use it as a mentor text for writing rather than for reading.  I think that it would make a good fall activity-read the story as a read aloud (it's not terribly well suited for that, but a person could make it work), share it on the document camera, whatever; then have the students write their own ghost stories as letters between themselves and a ghost.  This also would allow you as the adult to explain some of the puns and references that the kids may not understand.  I suppose that a proficient reader who has a mature sense of humor could fully enjoy this book independently, but I really do see it having more value used as a mentor text.

Deep and Dark and Dangerous, by Mary Downing Hahn

Title:  Deep and Dark and Dangerous
Author:  Mary Downing Hahn
Publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year:  2007
Pages:  192
Genre:  Supernatural Fantasy
Themes:  Secrets, Family, Ghost Story
Age Range:  4th through 6th Grade

Summary: (from Goodreads)
Just before summer begins, 13-year-old Ali finds an odd photograph in the attic. She knows the two children in it are her mother, Claire, and her aunt Dulcie. But who’s the third person, the one who’s been torn out of the picture?

Ali figures she’ll find out while she’s vacationing in Maine with Dulcie and her four-year-old daughter, Emma, in the house where Ali’s mother’s family used to spend summers. All hopes for relaxation are quashed shortly after their arrival, though, when the girls meet Sissy, a kid who’s mean and spiteful and a bad influence on Emma.

Strangest of all, Sissy keeps talking about a girl named Teresa who drowned under mysterious circumstances back when Claire and Dulcie were kids, and whose body was never found. At first Ali thinks Sissy’s just trying to scare her with a ghost story, but soon she discovers the real reason why Sissy is so angry. . . . 


Review:
Anyone who reads my adult book blog or visits my Goodreads profile will know that I love a good supernatural horror story.  The fact that I have read pretty much everything that Stephen King has ever written is a pretty big clue.  But my love of scary ghost stories started long before I was old enough to read Uncle Stevie...some of my favorite books as a middle grade child were The Figure in the Shadows and The House With the Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs.  Big spooky houses, mysterious noises, creepy characters-I loved being scared.  I can only imagine that Mary Downing Hahn felt similarly, since she has made quite a career of writing scary stories for young readers.


Deep and Dark and Dangerous was the perfect book for me to start my summer reading with.  The cottage that Ali and her aunt and cousin go to for the summer sounds like the perfect getaway-a cozy cottage with a light, airy studio; the cool lake surrounded by beautiful northern forests.  But Hahn quickly turns that idyllic setting into something creepy and menacing.  When Sissy shows up and starts harassing Ali and Emma it is clear that everything is not as it seems.  Soon every shadow, every noise, every bump in the night makes Ali and her family more and more unsettled.  


Despite the spooky atmosphere, the story stays just this side of being too creepy for the intended audience.  In fact, once the ghost is revealed, the story actually becomes more about doing what is right than about scaring the pants off of the reader.  In the end, the story is more about how mean children can be to each other, and how important it is to take responsibility for your mistakes.  This book would be a great addition to any classroom library.  I could even see it as part of a ghost stories theme unit.  But make sure that you read it with the lights on!