Seventh grader Kat has a situation on her hands. A book I can honestly recommend to any kid looking for some great ghostly fare. With a rare combination of readability and genuine middle school trials and tribulations, author Elizabeth Cody Kimmel gives a well-placed kick to a genre that deserves a little rejiggering here and a little remastering there. Is it interesting? Is it good? Does it fall into the usual trips, traps, and snares common to the genre? But to my amazement this book sucks me in instantly. As a children’s librarian I’ve trained myself to look for certain qualities in my fiction for kids. But the pickings are slim and my flight has been delayed another hour and a half (thank YOU, Delta). Of course the book’s agent is going to think it’s the best single thing since sliced bread. She had assured me that it was great, which I took with a grain of salt or two. I’m alternating between bad crazy books and bad depressing books in an effort to simply make the time go faster when I remember that a literary agent I know, who happens to be taking the same flight as me, gave me Suddenly Supernatural not a day before. So I pull out anything I happen to have on hand, and most of it is simply terrible. Under normal circumstances I have a problem with overstocking my purse with reading material. So I’m on a plane ride from Seattle to New York and wouldn’t you know it but I don’t bring enough books to read.
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