Ghost Buddy – Always Dance with a Hairy Buffalo

Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's Always Dance with a Hairy Buffalo is a Ghost Buddy comedy for 7 year olds about a boy with two left feet and a ghost who thinks he's the best dancer ever.

What happens

Billy Broccoli shares his bedroom with Hoover Porterhouse III, a fourteen-year-old ghost who has lived in the closet for ninety-nine years. Only Billy can see him. Everyone else just feels a sudden chill.

Billy's class has to perform a Chumash dance at the Natural History Museum on Friday night, in front of all the parents. His partner is Ruby, whose toes he keeps treading on. So the Hoove decides Billy needs lessons, with a baseball bat for a dance partner and the wastebasket as a drum.

It's properly funny. Next door, Rod Brownstone spots two baseball bats floating round Billy's room and calls his dad on a walkie-talkie to come and make an arrest. Billy's dentist stepdad explains ghosts away with a science lecture, while the Hoove knocks the cutlery off the table right in front of him.

Then, on the school playground, the Hoove sees a girl nobody else seems to notice. She has long black hair, there's a faraway rattle and a drumbeat, and the moment Billy sees her she vanishes into thin air. For once the Hoove is the one who's lost for words.

Billy's in middle school and has a crush on Ruby, and the Hoove's advice about girls is dreadful (never wave back, and never, ever say "yikes"). It's all sweet rather than soppy. Billy's honesty goes down much better than any of the Hoove's rules!

It bounces along with a joke every few lines, and the Hoove's "Rules" are the kind of thing your reader will quote at you for weeks. Does your reader like a sidekick with a very high opinion of himself? They'll love the Hoove.

This isn't where Billy and the Hoove first meet, but the opening pages fill you in quickly.

What to read next

If they'd like to go back to where it all began, Zero to Hero is the first Ghost Buddy book. Billy refuses to get out of the car outside his creepy new house, and a boy with a tape measure threatens to report him for trespassing.