Night Spirits: Pleasing the Ghost by Sharon Creech

I'm Dennis, your basic ordinary nine-year-old boy, and usually I live a basic, ordinary life. I go to school. I take care of my dog. Sometimes, though, my life is not so ordinary. This is because of the ghosts.

The first ghost came a month after my father died. It was my Great Gran, but I didn't know she was a ghost. She seemed real enought to me. When I mentioned Great Gran's visit to my mother she said, "Dennis, Great Gran is in heaven."

"Not last night she wasn't," I said.

But when the night wind blows in the ghost of Dennis' Uncle Arvie, things are a bit more complicated. The ghostly Arvie, dressed in cowboy gear from his boots to his Stetson, clearly has a mission for Dennis to carry out among the living. Trouble is, before his death Uncle Arvie suffered a stroke which seriously affected his word choices, and when he shakes Dennis awake with an urgent message, "Pin pasta dinosaur," Dennis has to struggle to decipher Uncle Arvie's ardent plea.

Dennis finally figures out that his uncle wants to give his widow Julia three important gifts he had hidden before his death, and although Arvie can fly through the air and sleep ("stamp") suspended on a bureau top, he needs Dennis' intervention to carry out these tasks: locating a love letter to Julia inside a book, finishing his painting of the two of them on their honeymoon, and locating a buried cash box with Arvie's life savings for his dear wife.

Although Dennis comes to appreciate his ghostly uncle and is happy to see his Aunt Julia's happiness as she receives the gifts from the great beyond, he still hopes that the next ghost that blows in on the night wind will be his father.

Newbery author Sharon Creech's Pleasing the Ghost is a poignant but funny ghost story that will appeal to beginning chapter readers and those who like their ghosts on the benign and light-hearted side.