A Festival of Ghosts

A Festival of Ghosts by William Alexander is a ghost story for 8 year olds whose heroine calms the dead down for a living.

What happens

Rosa Ramona Diaz is an assistant appeasement specialist. Not a ghost hunter. The distinction matters to her. Ghosts don't frighten her, and if one sends her a bad dream she sends it straight back.

She and her friend Jasper are up a tree with a pumpkin each, tying wisp lanterns as high as they can reach. Somebody smashed all the low ones yesterday. Somebody smashed the metal ones too.

Rosa loathes heights, by the way. She climbs anyway, and then looks down, which she knows is a mistake, and does every time.

The town of Ingot used to have no ghosts at all. Now it has all of them, and the people who live there are split down the middle about it. Which is how three children with a slingshot end up underneath that tree shooting the lanterns out one by one, and how Jasper ends up saying the word rage very calmly, the way you'd read it out of a picture book.

Rosa's answer to most problems is that she wishes she'd brought her sword.

She's brilliant company. She quotes a sixteenth century duellist who killed so many people she took up appeasement to calm their ghosts down afterwards, then turned a donkey cart into a travelling library. Rosa keeps her on hand the way other children keep a favourite footballer.

This picks up after an earlier story, and the opening fills you in as it goes, so a reader can start here without feeling lost.

Something to have in mind. Rosa's father is dead. It isn't the plot, it's just there underneath, in the memory of him saying I've got you after a nightmare, and in something following her about that she can't yet name. For a child who has lost someone, that could be either exactly right or completely too much, and you'll know which.

The hostility in the town is real too. Somebody has been going round smashing the lanterns, Jasper's list of what can't reach you up a tree runs to baseball bats and broomsticks, and the children with the slingshot are the mayor's own.

What to read next

If they're after another child who takes ghosts seriously, Midnight at the Barclay Hotel has a boy who hates reading, loves his infrared camera, and talks his mum into a weekend at the most haunted building in town.