Ghost Town at Sundown

Mary Pope Osborne's Ghost Town at Sundown is a Wild West adventure for 7 year olds that starts with a piano playing itself.

What happens

Jack and Annie follow a long-legged rabbit into the Frog Creek woods and find Morgan le Fay waiting up in the magic tree house. She gives them a book about the Old West and a riddle written on a scroll.

Then the tree house spins. They land on a hot, dry prairie outside a place called Rattlesnake Flats. One unpaved street. A few sagging buildings. A patch of ground with tombstones on it.

A rattlesnake sends them running into the town. Then a sad tune drifts out of the hotel. The piano keys are going up and down and nobody is sitting at them.

Jack has a very sensible explanation for that. It lasts until Annie points out that the Wild West did not have electricity.

Next, three riders come through with a herd of stolen horses. Jack and Annie hide in barrels and listen. The rustlers have taken a red mare and left her colt behind because he could not keep up.

That is the moment the riddle stops mattering. Annie is not going to leave a lost colt out on a prairie at dusk, and Jack knows he will not change her mind.

Help turns up as a mustang herder called Slim, who says hello by pointing a six-shooter and calling them the smallest horse thieves he has ever come across. He hands out nicknames. Annie is Smiley. Jack is Shorty, which Jack does not enjoy one bit.

The real pleasure of reading it is Jack. He shakes out his cowboy boots in case of scorpions. He stops to look up the correct way to treat a horse while his sister is already sitting on one. When Slim asks whether anyone has questions, Jack thinks, yup, about a million. You get his running commentary the whole way through.

There are guns in this one, though, and the men holding them steal horses for a living. The last stretch is a night rescue with real danger in it. Nobody is hurt in front of you, but a child who gets wound up about an animal in trouble will stay wound up about that colt for a good few chapters. If yours likes being a bit scared and then very relieved, it is pitched about right.

It is short, too, which suits a reader still building up to longer chapter books.

What to read next

Jack and Annie do talk about this trip again later on. If the horses are the part that lands, Stallion by Starlight puts a wild black one in their way.