Pemba's Song: A Ghost Story (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
Pemba's Song is a story about a girl named Pemba who discovers a special gift: She sees ghosts.In the begining of the book we are introduced to Pemba and her mother. Pemba is upset with her mom, because she is moving her away from Brooklyn and her friends to a small town in Connecticut where her mom was offered a great job and an opportunity for a fresh start.Pemba and her mother meet a strange man named Abraham who lives at the local library. She soons befriends this man and helps him with some local research. She soons discovers that the little town and the new house (or should I say old house) they live in holds lots of secrets and one of them is the ghost a slave girl named Phyllis who lived in the house in the late 1700's.Phyllis begins to visit Pemba in supernatural ways, asking her to help her bring justice to two unsolved murders that occured there....I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good ghost story. At the end of the book we learn that the writers of the book indeed met a man by the name of Abraham who inspired this book and its history. So I thought that was pretty cool ^-^ FIRST holla to POC on the cover. Especially because it's a MIDDLE GRADES book man. And I tell you what, teaching at a school where the minority are the white kids, it means a lot to my kids to see POC on the books that I bring in. AND it's especially thumbs up in my book because THIS ONE isn't about gangs.* Pemba is in high school. She's groovin' in the city, learning her step moves and listening to hip-hop when her mom decides that they need to move to someplace a bit more wholesome. Like a small town in CT where she swears she's got to be the only black person. Well, except for this goofy old man named Abraham.As soon as she enters her new house though she begins to have this weird unexplainable moments of blackouts and headaches intermingled with what she concludes are odd daydreams. Finally the frequency of them leads her to confide in Abraham and together they unravel a mystery, and murder, and a an untold slavery story.I LOVED this little book and read it in one quick setting. It's the perfect read for a kid who wants to get into a spooky spirit for Halloween. In fact, it didn't make it a day on my desk before one of my students picked it up. For any of you Read-A-Thoners who want to find a quick read, I would recommend this one for sure.____________* My students dig the gang books, mind you, but COME ON!!! Every black or Hispanic person is not in a gang.
What do You think about Pemba's Song: A Ghost Story (2008)?
The genre combination made this an engaging story. A great model for multiple genre writing.
—cla
a good reminder that slavery was more wide spread then people concider
—correagrl
A quick ghost story. I see a future book talk with this title.
—chameleon
