by Cornelia Funke
ages: 9-12
First sentence: “I was eleven when my mother sent me to boarding school in Salisbury.”
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Jon Whitcroft, at war with his mother’s fiance (his father died years before), is sent away to boarding school. He feels it’s a punishment because his mother loves The Beard, as Jon has dubbed him, better. So, Jon expects to hate his time at school. But that was before he met Ella, made friends with Angus and Stu, and started seeing ghosts.

Turns out there’s a ghost of a old baron, Stourton, who has vowed to kill every Hartgill — Jon’s mother’s maiden name — who shows up at the school. And Jon’s his next target. The only way to stop him? William Longspee, bastard son of Richard the Lionheart, and sworn defender of those in need. Sure, he’s a ghost too, but since when has that ever stopped anyone?

This wasn’t a bad little ghost story. Which is to say that it wasn’t great, either. I think I’ve read a run of books that had telling vs. showing issues, and I have to admit that it’s driving me batty. Sure, this one was pitched as a man telling his reflections of a year at boarding school, and so maybe the telling can be forgiven. But, on the other hand, why tell it that way? Why give us the assurance that it would turn out all right? I think the tension, the story would have been greater if we didn’t know that the story would end happily, that perhaps Jon and his friends were in a danger that they couldn’t get out of. But Funke gave us that out, and I thought the book suffered for it.

Even so, it’s a decent walk through history, and I enjoyed Ella, Jon and Longspee as characters. It just wasn’t as great as I’d hoped it would be.