A Good Night For Ghosts

A Good Night For Ghosts by Mary Pope Osborne sends 7 year olds to New Orleans on the spookiest night of the year, hunting a ghost and finding a boy with a coal cart.

What happens

This is one of the later Merlin Missions, and the recap at the front does the catching up for you. Merlin wants Jack and Annie to help creative people give their gifts to the world. They did the last one in Vienna. This time Teddy and Kathleen hand them a magic trumpet and a name. Louis Armstrong.

There's one rule. The trumpet works once, and only when they face their greatest danger.

They land in 1915, barefoot, on Canal Street, with vendors shouting about buttermilk and blackberries and a newsboy who tells them it is the eve of All Saints' Day. Louis Armstrong is fourteen. He is not the King of Jazz yet. He is not performing at all.

He is shovelling coal.

Everyone calls him Dipper. He gets fifteen cents a cartload and takes seventy-five cents home to his mother, his sister and the baby, and when his old singing quartet turn up begging him to come and do the parade, he says no and means it. So Jack and Annie's job is to convince a boy with a family to feed that his singing matters. That is a much harder thing than outrunning a ninja, and the book knows it.

The chapter I loved is the one where nothing happens at all. Dipper takes them along the Mississippi behind a mule called Lady and points out that music is everywhere if you actually listen. The pie man's voice. The women calling black-berrieeeeees. The mule's hoofbeats. Then he teaches them to scat-sing, which is his trick for when you cannot think of the words. Just sing sounds. Put your heart in it and folks will understand you.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There is a proper haunted-house stretch in this one. A storm shuts the three of them inside an old blacksmith shop on Bourbon Street, the door sticks, the matches run out one at a time, a bat flaps past their heads, and then a door creaks somewhere in the back and something starts moaning. A child who enjoys being frightened will be absolutely delighted. A child who does not will want the landing light on. It is atmosphere rather than anything gory, but it is dark and loud for a good few pages.

There's also plenty of 1915 New Orleans speech, so your reader may need a little run-up at some of it.

What to read next

For the trip that set this one up, Moonlight on the Magic Flute is in the library too. That one lands Jack and Annie in a palace in Vienna, in a wig and an enormous hoopskirt, hunting a musician called Mozart and getting followed everywhere by a very naughty small boy.