With apologies to A Chorus Line, Dance 3 Looks 10. The illustrations are very nice but the story is kind of …meh.

I almost passed on this but I feel like some children like a gentle Halloween and not a scary Halloween. So I’ll keep this a while and see.

YMMV because witchcraft, spells, ghost talk . ( )

"Dorrie is a witch. A little witch. Her hat is always on crooked. Her socks don't match and her hair isn't combed. She lives in a house with a tall, tall tower. Inside the tower is a little secret room where the Big Witch mixes up magic." And so begins Dorrie and the Haunted House, the seventh entry in Patricia Coombs' twenty-book series about an endearing little witch - a series that was one of the staples of my early reading life. I LOVED Dorrie as a little girl, and my recent retrospective, in which I've been rereading the Dorrie books in chronological order, has only reaffirmed that love!

In this installment, Dorrie finds herself locked out of the house during a violent thunderstorm, as the Big Witch and the rest of the witching and wizarding community hold a conclave on how to respond to the theft of Witchville's magical Blue Ruby. Hoping to take shelter on a neighbor's porch, Dorrie - faithful cat companion Gink by her side - becomes lost in the woods instead, eventually finding herself at a notorious haunted house. Exploring was never so much fun, until Dorrie begins to hear noises inside the house! Is it ghosts? Or a different kind of adversary altogether...?

I was struck, while reading this on my morning commute, that Dorrie and the Haunted House is far creepier than some of the earlier entries in the series. All the foreshadowing, the scenes in which Dorrie flees from the "ghosts," the episode in which she has locked herself in the bathroom, and is hiding in the bathtub (a classic horror trope, if ever there was one), all would have had me on the edge of my seat, as a young girl, thereby making the happy ending all the more satisfying! Coombs' illustrations are just as adorable as ever, depicting Dorrie and Gink in all their gamine charm. The scene in which the location of the Blue Ruby is revealed, uses a very effective burst of color.

My only criticism - and it is slight enough that I wouldn't deduct anything from the rating - is that the cover-art on the earlier books in the series appears to have been much more colorful. It's regrettable that the covers lost some of that bright appeal. Still, that's a minor quibble. This is still a fantastic little volume, like all the Dorrie books, and is highly recommended to anyone who appreciates witchy tales! ( )