James is fed up. His family has moved to a new cottage – with grounds that are great for excavations, and trees that are perfect for climbing – and stuff is happening. Stuff that is normally the kind of thing he does.

And he’s getting blamed for it. But it’s not him who’s writing strange things on shopping lists and fences. It’s not him who smashes bottles and pours tea in the Vicar’s lap. It’s a ghost – honestly.

Thomas Kempe the apothecary has returned and he wants James to be his apprentice. No one else believes in ghosts. It’s up to James to get rid of him. Or he’ll have no pocket money or pudding ever again.

From the Publisher’s Blurb

My Thoughts

I hadn’t heard of either the book or the author, until Nymeth’s review a few weeks ago, it sounded a perfect book to read during R.I.P. IV and there was a copy available on Bookmooch, so home a copy came!

I finished this one about two weeks ago, and I’m pleased I left it until now to review it. I was initially a little disappointed with it. The story really didn’t grab me. However as I’ve been mulling this review over, I’ve warmed to it’s easy nostalgia a bit more. It reminds me a lot of the type of book I read as a young boy.

The style, plot and character types all hark back to a different style of children’s and young adult books than I have read in recent years, and I suppose that a little of where my initial disappointment came from. Now thinking back on it, it was a pleasant return to my youth. And there were a lot of nice touches sprinkled throughout from the initial humour at Kempe’s grumpy attitude through to the sorta-sadness you feel for his growing bewilderment at the modern world.

But in the end, while I did enjoy it, and I certainly like it more than I thought I did, it’s not going to become any more that that. Just a decent and enjoyable read.

Rating:

I had a couple of passages marked to quote, but it turns out there the same one Nymeth quoted, so I’ll just encourage to to go read her review but I will quote this one about the town library, because how could you not like it!

In the children’s section every book had the appearance of having been well and truly read, or even, in the case of books for very young children, partially eaten. It was a satisfactory place: familiar, yet inexhaustibly surprising, homely but exotic in its offerings. To plunge into its gloomy entrance was like opening a grocery box and finding it full of Christmas presents.

Buy, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, from The Book Depository.