Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Josh is forced to live with his stepfather's elderly aunt for the summer while his parents are in India. Aunt Ethel is eccentric, living in an old house far from town where she believes that her dead sister has been reincarnated into a peacock. But Josh also finds her somewhat endearing when she serves spaghetti for breakfast and he learns that she's an excellent baker. Meeting the ghost of a dead miner adds interest to Josh's life as does the miner's request to bury a leg he lost with the rest of his body. This mission puts Josh in danger when he discovers some money that was stolen years ago and the thief returns for it. Peg Kehret's tale (Dutton, 2005) is slow to evolve and Josh's confrontation with the thief is not particularly terrorizing. Charles Carroll never varies the pitch or tone of Josh's voice, even when he should be feeling panic or fear. This makes Josh sound earnest but too mellow at times when he should be scared or desperate.-Edith Ching, University of Maryland, College Park (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 5-8. By turns comic and scary, Kehret's seventeenth novel is rooted in both the supernatural and the gritty reality of coal miners' lives in the first years of the last century. Hero-narrator Josh is sent to stay with a distant relative in Carbon City, Washington. From the moment he crosses the threshold of his aunt's old country house and witnesses her using a shotgun on a bat in the kitchen, he knows he has crossed into a life new and strange. With no TV, CDs, or DVDs, Josh occupies himself with a long bike ride into town, past a cemetery and a tree house said to be haunted. And haunted it is. Its ghost, the specter of an old coal miner who died in a disaster in 1903, has a mission for Josh; he wants the boy to dig up his leg, which was buried before the miner died, and reunite it with the rest of him. When Josh exhumes the limb, he discovers a buried box of cash. A bored kid in a dead-end town turns sleuth in this fun, fast-moving caper. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2005 Booklist
Horn Book Review
Reluctantly spending the summer with eccentric aunt Ethel, Josh encounters the one-legged ghost of a man whose leg and body were buried separately. Willie asks Josh to re-bury his leg with the rest of his remains. When Josh starts digging, he finds a box of stolen money and solves a local mystery. Kehret's fast-paced story offers likable characters and plenty of suspense. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Twelve-year-old Josh expected his summer with an elderly relative in Carbon City, Wash. to be utterly boring. However, his aunt turns out to be amusingly eccentric, and a secluded tree house in the woods is a perfect place to read and watch deer. There he encounters the ghost of a one-legged coal miner, Willy Martin. Willie asks him to dig up his lost leg and bury it with the rest of his body. Surprisingly, Josh agrees, but he finds more than just leg bones; the man who stole the money the town had raised for an animal shelter had hidden it in the leg's uncared-for grave. Josh's first-person narrative literally opens with a bang, as Aunt Ethel shoots a bat in her kitchen his first night there. The action moves quickly to the suspenseful moment when the robber, seeking to retrieve his treasure, threatens Josh at gunpoint. A subplot involving taming an abandoned cat may add interest for animal lovers. Easy to booktalk, this is a solidly plotted ghost story for middle-grade readers. (Fiction. 9-12) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.