OK, my excuse for reviewing this book in English this time is that it is a very English story.

Jon Whitcroft doesn't get on with his mother's new partner, so he is sent away to boarding school. He goes, in fact, to the Cathedral School in Salisbury. I don't know Salisbury very well, so in my mind's eye a lot of the action takes place around Wells Cathedral, where I was at the Cathedral School - like Jon's friend Ella, a day pupil at a boarding school. In particular, Jon's boarding house translates (very roughly) into Shrewsbury House in Wells.

Against this background Funke has written an absorbing ghost story. As usual, she has blended tradition seamlessly with imagination, to come up with a whole that is quite entrancing. A number of full colour, full page illustrations by Friedrich Hechelmann make the book something particularly special.

But it was still odd to be reading such an English story in German...