Liesl & Po

Lauren Oliver's Liesl & Po is a quiet, odd, lovely ghost story for 10 year olds, and it starts three nights after a funeral.

What happens

Liesl is shut in the attic. Her stepmother put her there months ago and the world outside, she has been told, would eat her up.

So she reads and she draws and that's it.

Then one night the shadows in the corner crimp and flex, the way dough does under a cookie cutter, and something her own height is standing by her wobbly desk.

Po is a ghost. Po is not a boy or a girl, and gets quite shirty when Liesl insists it has to be one or the other. Po has forgotten what it used to be. Next to Po is Bundle, who is not a cat and not a dog either, and who says mwark.

Liesl asks Po to take a message to her father on the Other Side.

What's so good here is the tone. It's a book about a dead parent that is never once gloomy. Po is rude. Liesl is stubborn. The two of them bicker like children who have just met at a party and aren't sure yet whether they'll be friends.

Meanwhile, down on the street below the attic window, there's a boy called Will.

Will is apprenticed to an alchemist. His master calls him Useless and Hopeless and Snot-Face, makes him sleep out with the chickens when he ruins a potion, and sends him across the city at night on errands. He has been standing under Liesl's window every night for a year because the light up there is the only warm thing he knows.

Tonight he's carrying a box the size of a loaf of bread, and he's about to do his two jobs in the wrong order.

Your reader will see what's coming a good while before anybody in the book does, and that's deliberate and delicious.

Grief is right there from the first line, and that is worth going in knowing. Liesl's father died of a long illness and her stepmother refused to let her say goodbye. She spells her favourite word three times in her head to stop herself crying. It's tender rather than upsetting, and it runs right through the opening. For a child who has lost someone, that could be the very reason to read it or the very reason not to.

What to read next

If they take to it, The Graveyard Book is waiting. Fair warning on that one, it opens with a man walking through a house with a knife, and a baby who has just climbed out of his cot is the only one who gets away.