Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Of which, of course, my oldest daughter is one.  I can’t remember what I was doing when Bruce Coville’s Ghost trilogy blipped onto my radar, but it seemed like the kind of thing she’d enjoy.  I therefore put The Ghost in the Third Row on hold at our library, and the rest is almost history–we’ve both read it AND The Ghost Wore Gray, and I just finished The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed on the treadmill and stuck it on her bookshelf on my way upstairs.  All three are fairly short, fast-paced, action-packed, and filled with just enough history to make me want to do a happy dance; they’re not difficult reads, but they’re certainly for middle elementary students and up (unless, I suppose, you have an excellent very young reader who’s really into ghosts and isn’t going to have nightmares after reading about them).  There were a lot of ghost stories like this in the mid-70s to the early 90s, now that I’m thinking about it–Avi’s Something Upstairs, Richard Peck’s The Ghost Belonged to Me and Voices After Midnight, and more that escape me at the moment–stories with just a bit of a similar feel to them.  If you or your kiddos have enjoyed any of those, try these; if you enjoy these, try some of those next.

Either way, you won’t be disappointed.