Dirk Bones and the Mystery of the Haunted House (I Can Read Book 1)
Kindergarten-Grade 2&ndash;Dirk Bones, a skeleton newspaper reporter forThe Ghostly Tombs, is dispatched to a haunted house on Ghoul Street, where the residents complain about spooky noises coming from their cellar. Dirk's investigation leads him to the nearby graveyard, where the sounds are traced to a crypt containing a bubbling soup pot and a vampire who is writing a cookbook. Cushman's illustrations are delightfully silly and spirited; his hilarious plot will please youngsters who often claim that they want horror but are relieved to get humor instead. This title has more sentences per page and more sophisticated puns than the usual Level 1 reader. However, librarians, whose focus is not exclusively decoding, will welcome this addition to the primer shelves both at Halloween time and throughout the year.&ndash;Gloria Koster, West School, New Canaan, CTCopyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.