| "GHOSTHUNTERS and the INCREDIBLY REVOLTING GHOST"
Author: Cornelia Funke
Interest Level: Lower/Middle Grades (2-5)
ATOS Reading Levels: 4.4
AR Points: 2.0
Publisher Recommended Age: 9-12
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
Book Type: Paperback
Pages: 135
Nine-year-old Tom can't catch a break: He's a klutz, his sister Lola pretty much hates his guts, and--and this is a BIG "and"--he just found a ghost camping out in his cellar. Lucky for Tom his grandma's best friend just happens to be the world's foremost ghosthunter.
Under her expert tutelage, Tom learns the tools of the trade--which just happen to include buckets of graveyard dirt--and soon finds he has to face down not just the Averagely Spooky Ghost (ASG) in his basement but the Incredibly Revolting Ghost (IRG) in town. All while keeping the nettlesome Lola off his trail. . . .
Book Reviews:
School Library Journal: "Something wicked is in the cellar, and it's up to nine-year-old Tom to eradicate it in Cornelia Funke's light-hearted thriller." Grades 2-4.
About the Author:
Cornelia Funke was born in 1958 in the German town of Dorsten. As a child, she wanted to become an astronaut and or a pilot, but then decided to study Education ("Pädagogik") at the University of Hamburg. After finishing her studies, Funke worked for three years as a social worker, focusing on children with a deprived background. She had a stint illustrating books, but soon began writing her own stories, inspired by the sorts of stories that had appealed to the deprived children she had worked with.
During the late 1980s and the 1990s, Funke established herself in Germany with two children's series, namely the fantasy-oriented Gespensterjäger (Ghosthunters) and the Wilde Hühner (Wild Chicks) line of books. Her international breakthrough came with the fantasy novel Dragon Rider (1996), which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 78 weeks, and was continued with The Thief Lord (2000, translated into English in 2002), which immediately climbed to the #2 position of the New York Times bestseller list, stayed there for 19 weeks and sold 1.5 million copies.
Her follow-up novel was Inkheart (2003), which won the 2003 BookSense Book of the Year Children's Literature award. Inkheart was the first part of a trilogy which was continued with Inkspell (2005), which won Funke her second BookSense Book of the Year Children's Literature award.
As a testament to her growing importance, Time magazine listed Funke as one of the "100 most influential people of 2005", calling her the "German J. K. Rowling" and praised her work as a mix of "(underrated) prose, moody, unpredictable characters and the instinctive feel of her plots, which are happily devoid of emotional manipulation". The trilogy was finally concluded in Inkdeath (published in Germany in 2007, English version Spring 2008, American version Fall 2008).
Funke married printer Rolf Funke in 1981. They have two children, Anna (b. 1989) and Ben (b. 1994). For the next 24 years, the Funke family lived in Hamburg, before they moved to Los Angeles in May 2005. Rolf Funke died of cancer in 2006 in a Los Angeles hospital. |
