A Good Night for Ghosts

Magic Tree House #42 

Author: Mary Pope Osborne 

Illustrator: Sal Murdocca 

Date Published: 2009

About the book: Mary Pope Osborne wrote this book out of her love for Jazz. After living in New Orleans for a few weeks with husband Will, Mary and Will became huge fans of Louis Armstrong and avid collector of his recordings. Mary decided to learn about the life and work of Louis Armstrong which gave birth to this piece of literature. 

Summary: Jack and Annie must travel back in time to New Orleans in 1915 to help a teenaged Louis Armstrong fulfill his destiny and become the "King of Jazz."  

Genre: The genre of this book is Fantasy. Fantasy can be defined as "Imaginative literature distinguished by characters, places, or events that could not happen in real world. Animals can talk, innate objects have feelings, time follows the author's rules, and human accomplish superhuman feat." (Galda, Cullinan, & Sipe. 2010, p.16)  The book revolves around Jack and Annie time traveling to different places and time period via their magic tree house. It also talks about singing, dancing ghosts and magic instruments. These are events that are a figment of Mary's imagination and could never happen in real life. Thus my rational for classifying this book as fantasy. 

Illustration: 

  

The subdued colors of the illustration clearly depicts the time period the children traveled back to. In 1915, everything was, and people only saw things in three colors; black, white, and grey. This was confirmed through my many search on the internet about that time period. The illustrations are very interesting and the scenes, objects, and characters  correlates with the time period. The style of art the illustrator uses seems to be representational art as the illustrations depict  people or objects in a realistic way. The technique of the illustration reflects drawing and the medium seems to be pencils and graphite. There is not much illustrations in the book; For every chapter there is only once illustration. However, these illustration compliments the chapters beautifully and reflects the main idea wonderfully. The illustration on the cover is very colorful and the illustrator did a spectacular job. This presentation will beckon to children and make them gravitate towards the book.  

Motivational Activity: 

Before Reading:                                                 Music 

• Play a few Louis Armstrong Jazz or any other Jazz music to introduce students to the genre of music. 

• General discussion about students interpretation of the music, whether they liked it or not, why they did or did not like jazz, and how it made them feel. 

After Reading:                                                Geography

• Throughout the reading of the story, teacher and students will document all the places they traveled to in the story. 

• Using Atlases, Maps and Globe, students will then locate these places and record their coordinates next to the name of the place. This will be published in the classroom. 

Personal Opinion: I think this is a great book for children. Although the book is a chapter book, the chapters are not long and drawn out. I like that it is about Jazz as this is a genre of music we no longer hear a lot about. Some children have never heard about Jazz, especially  children of this era. Although the book is a fantasy book, the character Louis Armstrong is a real Jazz musician and through motivational activities and extensions to this book, children can learn a lot. The book is very entertaining and it also stimulates students imagination and senses. I would definitely recommend this book  to everyone. 

Other books by the author: 

• A Perfect Time for Pandas

• Soccer on Sunday

• Stallion by Starlight 

• High Time for Heroes 

References: 

Osborne, M. P., & Murdocca, S. (2009). A good night for ghosts. New York: Random House.

Galda, L., Cullinan, B. E., & Sipe, L. R. (2010). Literature and the child (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.