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.

Tryst with Trolls: The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer

If your idea of trolls is a cute little kewpie doll with bad hair, Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trollswill expand your concept of trolldom considerably.

Farmer's saga is not so much a blend of realistic adventure and fantasy quest as it is a chance to see the world as it would have likely been seen by a twelve-year-old Saxon farm lad in 793 A.D. In that time early Christianity and bits and pieces of Norse and Celtic cosmology were commingled in the minds of most, and Jack and his sister Lucy are no exceptions.

Jack, a boy of indifferent abilities, has recently been taken as apprentice by an elderly bard and has barely mastered Magic 101, fire-starting, fog-calling, and a few healing brews, when he and his five-year-old sister are seized as thralls in a raid by giant Viking Olaf One-Brow and his would-be berserking shield-maiden Thorgil. Pillaging and slaughtering as they go, Olaf, Thorgil, and their crew make their way back to their home fiord, where Jack, designated Olaf's skald (minstrel), is required to sing a hero song of Olaf's brave deeds before King Ivar the Boneless and his cruel shape-shifting half-troll wife Queen Frith.

When Jack's immature magic goes awry and causes Frith to lose her luxuriant locks and her human beauty, Lucy is seized and held for sacrifice in Freya's Fen unless Jack can find and drink from Mimar's Well in Jotunheim, the Land of the Trolls, and gain the wisdom and wizardry necessary to restore Frith's looks. With the hulking Olaf and ever-raging Thorgil joining the quest, Jack, his crow Bold Heart, and a few other raiders sail and trek toward the hall of the Mountain Queen, troll mother Glamdis.

When Olaf suddenly goes on to Valhalla after an unfortunate battle with a troll-bear, Jack and Thorgil must go it alone, battling dragons and giant spiders and charming the troll queen into granting safe passage to the waters of the enchanted well. Both Jack and Thorgil drink of the well and are changed. Thorgil loses her consuming anger and urge to die as a Valkyrie, and Jack gains a full understanding of the life force that fills all living things and their place in the structure of Yggdrassil, the Tree of Life. Jack's magical powers increase, he fulfils his promise to Frith with a most satisfying twist, and Jack and Lucy are returned to their village and parents in England, with a promise from Thorgil and the raiders that they will never again pillage his village.

Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls is a thumping-good adventure, a sweeping saga with a huge cast of totally weird but somehow likable characters, and a brief course in northern European mythology to boot. Despite its heft, it is a book which reads like a page-turner, filled with humor and love of life in all its strange manifestations, a book which will appeal to anyone old enough to pick it up and read it.

Update: The sequel to The Sea of Trolls, titled The Land of the Silver Apples, has recently been published. The final book in the trilogy, The Islands of the Blessed, is scheduled for release in 2009.