The Poltergoose

Gr 5-7-Jiggy McCue is being haunted. Something throws pillows across the room, pulls covers off the bed, and generally wreaks loud, hissing havoc all over the family's new house. His parents are blaming him for all the mess and his friends Pete and Angie think he's gone nuts. Then, the flapping phantom follows Jiggy to school and attacks his homeroom-invisible wings strike left and right and an invisible beak pecks at exposed sensitive body parts. Once again, Jiggy has to take the rap, but by now, his friends are convinced that he is the victim of a poltergoose. They identify the avian apparition as the deceased animal companion of grouchy former landowner Linus Brook. The old man tearfully explains that his temperamental pet had been run over by a bulldozer during the construction of the new subdivision, and had been buried unceremoniously in the nearest yard-Jiggy's. Evidently, the ghostly goose is seeking to be exhumed from her hasty grave and laid decently to rest near her old home, which, unfortunately, is now the site of a large shopping mall. Despite a plot based on digging up a long-dead bird and hiding the corpse until it can be reinterred, there is no explicit gore or gross-out humor. Jiggy and his friends are believable, realistic characters, although adults are shown as essentially clueless. The first-person narration is crisp and the dialogue has the authentic ring of adolescent banter. Middle schoolers will enjoy this off-the-wall combination of chills and belly laughs.