Friends Forever: Katie and Kimble: A Ghost Story by Linda Thieman

Kids love ghost tales, but for grownups who worry that ghost stories may be too scary for the beginning chapter book reader, Linda Thieman's Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story is a spook story with not a single shiver.

Katie and her family are moving into their new home, an old farmhouse a couple of miles from the town where her mom is to start her new job. Katie has just unpacked her things in her new room when she finds a definitely old-fashioned hair bow in mint condition. Repeatedly she hears a girl's laughter and then finds a dreidel on her dresser, right beside her jar of long-saved pennies.

Katie is convinced that the house is haunted, and in short order her personal ghost, Kimble Lawrence, appears and introduces herself, dressed in the fashion of the turn of the last century. Kimble shares the entrance to her own secret room entered through Katie's closet, and soon Katie and the ghost girl become the best of friends. Katie agrees to put her best detective skills to work to answer Kimble's questions about her lost mother. Tracking down an older neighbor with back copies of the town newspaper in her attic, Katie locates the sad story of the deaths, first of Rachel Lawrence, and then Kimble Lawrence two days later in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

To help Kimble understand why her mother was lost to her long ago, Katie and Kimble set out to an abandoned cemetery deep in the woods outside town, and in an unexpected turn of events, Katie's life is suddenly in danger and it is Kimble's turn to find a way to find help for her.

The second book in this beginning chapter book series is Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish.