Christmas Spirit

From Publishers Weekly Vicarages, silver sixpences, "the banked sleekness of chestnuts" and good-hearted ghosts are among the trimmings that give these posthumously collected stories their old-fashioned charm. In "The Christmas Ghost," a boy delivering a dinner pail to his factory foreman father sees an apparition; his father scoffs, but the boy's willingness to believe his own vision averts a full-scale catastrophe. "The Christmas Cat," set, like the other story, in England between the wars, an upper-class 11-year-old spends Christmas with her bachelor uncle, and his small-minded, mean-spirited housekeeper. The Carnegie Medal-winning author can be trusted not to overdo the sentiment and, like a good gingerbread, both tales have sweetness, spice and bite. Ages 8-up. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.