Not just a mystery, but an educational mystery

We have a tradition at our annual work party of a book exchange.  You get a book that has something to do with history (I work at a historic site) and you gift-wrap it.  Everyone who brings a book gets a number, and then the first person unwraps a book. The next person can either unwrap a book or steal the book the first person unwrapped, and so on.  Most people try not to spend much, if anything on the book. So I went to the basement of my local library to where they have books on sale for $.25, or free around Christmas! My choice this year was Bruce Coville’s The Ghost Wore Gray.  A lovely children’s book for a staff of adults!  And it’s kind of historic itself, because the book is no longer in print.

This is the second book in a series, the Nina Tenleven series.  The series features two girls, Nina and her friend Chris, as they encounter ghosts in various places and try to solve their mysteries.  This time Nina’s father is set to renovate the Quackadoodle Inn, a rundown inn originally built in the 1800’s. I was expecting some stuff about the Civil War in this, but I got a lot more history than I thought I would.  We get some Civil War, but we also get a lot about the Underground Railroad. Samson Carter is talked about quite a lot, and I felt bad because I had never heard of him before. And then I tried to look him up and felt less bad, because he didn’t exist.  But Bruce Coville wrote so well that I thought he was real! He even thought this was one of his best works, and is very pleased with the ending he wrote. It does have a lot of feeling, and works well. If this was still in print, I could see it being used in the classroom during a unit on the Civil War or the Underground Railroad.  All of the characters may be fictional, but the situations and attitudes are real.