african american, ghosts, halloween, holidays, fiction, cooking, scary, scary stories, texas, southern,

I enjoyed this book but I haven't anything remarkable to say about it. It was about a chef who stayed in a haunted house to win a reward and ended up cooking all night long for a 20 year old ghost. ( )

When a wailing, howling ghost haunts an abandonded house in East Texas, a reward is offered to the person who can stay in the house overnight. Dan, a chef, decides to give it a try. With his delicious Southern cooking, Dan satiates the ghost's eternal hunger and gets himself a dishwasher for life!

There was a $5000 reward offered to anyone that would sleep in a house in East Texas, supposedly haunted by a ghost called Sifty Sifty Sam. A chef named Dan took up the challenge, and indeed, encountered the ghost of Sifty Sifty Sam. It turns out, the ghost hadn't eaten in twenty years, and kept Dan busy, by eating everything he would cook. They got along well, it seems, and Dan won the $5000 reward. The haunted house was converted into a restaurant, Dan cooked the meals, and the ghost became the permanent dishwasher, in exchange for free meals. Angela Shelf Medearis wrote a story with a few unexpected twists. This contemporary haunted-mansion-ghost-story set itself apart from others, because it involved a realtor, a chef, and a dish-washing ghost. Yet, what was most unique, I found, was the rhyming patterns written throughout the book. The story unfolds itself, almost as a kind of poem, or song: "He ate fried chicken and pancakes, squash and french fries,/ heaps of vegetables, mounds of potatoes, and six kinds of pies./ He ate spaghetti and corn bread and dish after dish of Dan's crispy, delicious batter-dipped fish." The rhymes cry out for the story to be read aloud, or even better, read with an audience or partner. Jacqueline Rogers illustrated the book using watercolors, contrasting the monochromatic, sometimes blue, purple, or green, ghost with Dan and the rest of the book, all painted in a variety of colors. We can see from their expressions, how frightening the ghost was early on, and how scared Dan was, in return. Later in the story, we see that they both smile, and the ghost no longer takes over the pages, but appears equal to Dan in size. And on the final page, without any text, we see cars parked, and people heading over to the restaurant. ( )