This book is wildly out of print, but the library system in Toledo owns a copy, I think. Anyway, before she started writing fantasy novels with covers done by Kinuko Y. Craft, Patricia McKillip used to write children’s books. This is one of the rarer and stranger ones, and it’s not fantasy, unlike the Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy. It’s a ghost story.

Carol Christopher, skinny, red-haired, and a Californian in the early 70s, goes to visit her mother’s sister in small-town England one summer. Naturally she doesn’t fit in with the Middleton crowd; her cousin Bruce’s group of friends starts to torment her but she holds her own. Bruce and Carol have their own conflict, of course – Carol’s weeeeird and she’s his cousin! People will think he’s weird! In any case, one day, Carol sees a ghost in the basement of their 300-year-old house. It walks right through the wall. Uncle Harold, a history teacher, believes in facts and doesn’t believe in ghosts. However, Bruce not only believes her, he’s seen the ghost as well. Can they team up – despite their differences – and figure out what’s going on?

This was a delightful little book (192 pages), containing just about everything in exactly the right measure. There are quirky, small-town English characters; sympathetic but not too sympathetic parents; a youngish and very child-friendly priest (in the good way); and cats. Lots of cats. People’s reactions, especially Bruce’s and Carol’s, seem entirely realistic. Although the book was published in the early 1970s, the characters are timeless. Carol appears to be more northern Californian, with the hippies and the crunchy granola lifestyle, but these people still exist today (or so I’m told). Emily, the sweet-but-wispy older lady who lives in a house in the graveyard and tends various graves as a pastime, isn’t out of place (with perhaps different hobbies) anywhere.

The story is also timeless. While the ghost-plot depends a lot on English history, it’s a fairly common time period (the English Civil War) that is used and everything necessary is explained. People struggling to get along, especially when they don’t quite fit in, is a common kid-lit plotline, and it’s well- and interestingly-done here. (In case you hadn’t guessed, Carol’s not the only misfit in the area.)

The writing quite different from McKillip’s usual style, which is generally flowery and fairy-tale oriented. Overall it’s pretty straightforward; there is an adequate amount of description. Once in a while, though, a character will go off onto a semi-poetic flight of fantasy:

“Carol, that sunlight—it wasn’t right. They had shadows. They weren’t real, but they had shadows. Whose sunlight were we sitting in? Ours—or theirs? Who was real, then? Us or them? Were they in our time? Or were we in theirs? Or is time something like the house, where stones from different centuries exist side by side, and where people from different centuries can talk to each other?”

It doesn’t happen that, often, though. There’s also a fair amount of humor in the book, between the physical comedy of Carol’s clumsiness and offhand puns and remarks made by characters: “Is this lunch, or a lesson in possessive pronouns?”

If you can find a copy of this book, I’d highly recommend reading it. There are moments of surprising depth revealed through random dialogue, and the ending is greatly satisfying. I’ll give it a full 5/5 stars.