Ivy & Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go

Annie Barrows's Ivy & Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go is a school story for 7 year olds about a haunted bathroom and how fast a good rumour gets out of hand.

What happens

It's the second Ivy and Bean book, and the two of them are firm friends by now, sharing a table in Ms Aruba-Tate's class and getting separated for talking roughly every other week.

At lunchtime the Gymnastics Club is doing cartwheels. Zuzu can do twelve in a row and then a backbend. Ivy is guarding the jackets, because Ivy can't do a cartwheel at all and Bean has just cheerfully told everyone she can.

So Ivy says the first thing that comes into her head. There's an emergency. Over there. In the girls' toilets.

She'd walked through a cold mist that morning and heard a whining noise, and now she can see it, a pale cloudy patch by the door with yellowish eyes like little torches. Bean squints at it. Bean can see it too. A haunted loo, in her own school. How brilliant is that?

By the next lunchtime nobody in the school will go near that door, and a crowd is standing about on the grass watching in case an army of ghosts comes floating out.

Then Zuzu gets marched into the classroom for sneaking off to the big kids' toilets, bursts into tears, and points straight at Ivy.

What happens next is the bit that stings. Ivy won't say the bathroom isn't haunted, because she doesn't believe that, and the whole class has to sit on the rug while their lovely teacher explains about using your imagination responsibly. Ivy slides down behind Bean and wishes she'd never said the word ghost.

The real pleasure of these books is how seriously the two of them think everything through. There's an oath signed in spit, because blood attracts vampire bats. There's a portal to the underworld, which is definitely a stain on the cement. And there's the magic lab, one of five rooms Ivy has chalked out on her bedroom floor, where they go hunting for a potion that sends a ghost back where it came from.

Ghost-wise it's atmosphere rather than fright, and the ghost gets more sympathy than anything else.

What to read next

If they haven't read it yet, the first Ivy & Bean book is in the library too. That's the one where Bean is quite sure the nice girl over the road will be boring, right up until she badly needs somewhere to hide.