Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stayton Public Library | JF ALEXANDER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dallas Public Library | + Alexander, W. Properly | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Independence Public Library | J FICTION - ALEXANDER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | J Alexander, W. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Willamina Public Library | JF Alexander, W. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From National Book Award-winning author William Alexander comes a wryly humorous story about two kids who try to save their town by bringing back its ghosts.
Rosa Ramona Díaz has just moved to the small, un-haunted town of Ingot--the only ghost-free town in the world. She doesn't want to be there. She doesn't understand how her mother--a librarian who specializes in ghost-appeasement--could possibly want to live in a place with no ghosts. Frankly, she doesn't understand why anyone would.
Jasper Chevalier has always lived in Ingot. His father plays a knight at the local Renaissance Festival, and his mother plays the queen. Jasper has never seen a ghost, and can't imagine his un-haunted town any other way. Then an apparition thunders into the festival grounds and turns the quiet town upside down.
Something otherworldly is about to be unleashed, and Rosa will need all her ghost appeasement tools--and a little help from Jasper--to rein in the angry spirits and restore peace to Ingot before it's too late.
Author Notes
William Alexander won the National Book Award for his debut novel, Goblin Secrets , and won the Earphones Award for his narration of the audiobook. His other novels include A Festival of Ghosts , A Properly Unhaunted Place , Ghoulish Song , Nomad , and Ambassador . William studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at the Clarion workshop. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Like the protagonist of Nomad and Ambassador , William is the son of a Latino immigrant to the US. Visit him online at WillAlex.net and GoblinSecrets.com, and on Twitter via @WillieAlex.
Kelly Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author-illustrator and recipient of the E.B. White Award. She teaches illustration at her alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design. Kelly currently lives in her native New England, surrounded by the flora and fauna featured in Together We Grow. Find out more at KelMurphy.com.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-Ghosts and spirits live everywhere, except in the town of Ingot. Eleven-year-old Rosa Diaz and her mother have relocated to the sleepy hamlet following the death of Rosa's father. Accustomed to the big city, Rosa questions why her mother would move them to such a dead place. Rosa's mother is an "appeasement librarian," endowed with the ability to comfort ghostly spirits. Libraries and books are usually brimming with ghostly energy but not, unfortunately, in the ghost-free Ingot library. Rosa feels her mother's particular talents are wasted until the girl attends Ingot's yearly Renaissance Festival. The festival is attacked by a dynamic evil spirit that renders her mother defenseless. It is up to Rosa to uncover the town's supernatural goings-on. She befriends a local boy named Jasper. United, they fight to bring justice to the living and the dead. Though the writing is clear and the narrative unfolds quickly, the characters are somewhat flat. The world-building is similarly wanting; the spells and objects used to manipulate the ghost come out of nowhere and don't feel believable. VERDICT While the cute cover and fast pace may attract fans of ghost stories, a lack of character development limits this title's appeal.-Sada Mozer, Los Angeles Public Library © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rosa Díaz is not happy about moving to the town of Ingot, "the only unhaunted place Rosa had ever heard of." As the daughter of a renowned "appeasement specialist," trained to calm supernatural entities, Rosa knows that it's downright unnatural that Ingot's library isn't haunted. Venturing out from her windowless apartment in the library's basement, Rosa meets Jasper Chavalier, the 11-year-old son of two actors at the local Renaissance fair. After a vengeful, possessed tree attacks the festival, Rosa realizes that something sinister is behind Ingot's lack of hauntings, leading her and Jasper to confront a surprising villain. National Book Award winner Alexander (Goblin Secrets) neatly inverts the typical ghost story, creating a supernatural landscape in which hauntings are part of the fabric of life and go hand in hand with respecting and honoring the departed. The friends' realization that they must rely on themselves, not their parents, is relatable and poignant: Rosa's efforts to accept her mother's shortcomings and Jasper's struggle to find his inner hero add depth to this charming mystery. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8-12. Author's agent: Barry Goldblatt, Barry Goldblatt Literary. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In a world where hauntings are endemic, Rosa Daz finds herself in a town suspiciously devoid of ghostly activity in Alexander's (Nomad, 2016, etc.) latest. Latina protagonist Rosa is not your usual new-to-town middle school student. Rosa is an apprentice appeasement specialist. Her skills in placating restless souls are going to waste in the small town of Ingot, a place where people go to escape their hauntings, not to appease them. The placid lack of supernatural phenomena ends when an angry spirit gate-crashes opening day of the town Renaissance festival embodied in the carcass of a mountain lion. With the help of a new acquaintance, 11-year-old mixed-race (black/white) Jasper, Rosa sets out to solve the mysteries of where the phantom came from and why no others exist in this quaint town. Alexander does an excellent job of building a contemporary world in which the paranormal is nevertheless ubiquitous and expected. This haunted world begs for further exploration. Though it's a perfectly enjoyable tale on a purely superficial level, readers who choose to dig deeper will find an engrossing exploration of complicated grief and what damage may be wrought when negative emotions are barricaded away rather than addressed. A fun and fast-paced supernatural mystery with secret depths for those who dare explore them. (Paranormal adventure. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
What happens when you try to exile ghosts? For starters, you might create a situation of otherworldly, explosive wrath. But that's where librarians come in: in Alexander's fantasy world, created for middle-grade readers, librarians can appease ghosts. Rosa Díaz's family specializes in extreme hauntings, which is why she's directionless when she and her mother relocate to Ingot, the only ghost-free town in the world, after her father dies in a spectral accident. While her mother rests and mourns, Rosa starts exploring why Ingot seems to repel the dead. But then she meets local boy Jasper Chevalier, and a monster interrupts the local Renaissance festival, throwing the unhaunted town into chaos. Rosa and Jasper both children of color dig into local history and find themselves plunged into danger. National Book Award winner Alexander (Goblin Secrets, 2012) displays strong writing chops. His latest is perfect for kids who like their creepy moments mixed with wildly imaginative elements (like a motorcycle-riding spirit who denies he's dead). This should see plenty of circulation.--Cruze, Karen Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE NINTH HOUR, by Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In McDermott's novel, the cause of a young Irish widow and her daughter is taken up by the nuns of a Brooklyn convent. But as the years pass, this struggling pair can't banish worldly temptation, with possibly dire consequences for their faith. MANHATTAN BEACH, by Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.) Egan's first novel since the Pulitzer-winning "A Visit From the Goon Squad" tells a more traditional story - about a woman who works in the Brooklyn Navy Yards during World War II, and the disappearance of her father years earlier - but offers many of the same pleasures of language and character. A FORCE SO SWIFT: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China, 1949, by Kevin Peraino. (Crown, $28.) Peraino's absorbing study of the pivotal year in Chinese-American relations shows how decisions made then have continued to affect relations between the two countries down to the present day. NEW PEOPLE, by Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $26.) Set in mid-1990s Brooklyn, Senna's novel centers on a light-skinned black woman who despite her engagement to a biracial man becomes infatuated with a dark-skinned poet; it explores both the dream and the impossibility of a "post-racial" world. A LOVING, FAITHFUL ANIMAL, by Josephine Rowe. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) In Rowe's gorgeous and harrowing debut novel, an emotionally scarred Vietnam veteran disappears from a small Australian town, leaving his family behind to struggle with intergenerational trauma. HALF-LIGHT: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.) With its stylized spacing and typography, Bidart's work scores the speech inside his head. This career retrospective, a contender for a National Book Award this year, shows how he shed the masks of his early poems to create a kind of self-mythology. THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT, by Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A lynching and the legacy of Jim Crow haunt generations of a family in Henderson's second novel, which is ever alert to the proximity of oppressed and oppressor. Empathy for its troubled cast is one of the novel's great strengths. THE WOLF, THE DUCK & THE MOUSE, by Mac Barnett. Illustrated by Jon Klassen. (Candlewick, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) In this darkly witty collaboration, a mouse is gobbled up by a wolf. Inside, he meets a duck who has set up housekeeping. A PROPERLY UNHAUNTED PLACE, by William Alexander. (Margaret K. McElderry, $16.99; ages 8 to 12.) A woman who specializes in "ghost appeasement" and her daughter move to a town that has banished all ghosts, but all is not as calm as it seems. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books