Over My Dead Body: 43 Old Cemetery Road by Kate Klise & M. Sarah Klise (illustrator)

The Klise sisters are back with the follow-up to 43 Old Cemetery Road: Dying to Meet You. Here we once again catch up with Ignatius B. Grumply, Seymour Hope and that wonderful ghost, Olive C. Spense, who are now part of their very own publishing group. Olive and Ignatius do the writing, Seymour does the drawing and the readers pay $3 for their stories. It's worked out quite nicely since they have been able to buy the house on Cemetery Road and are all living happily.

But their happiness is soon dampened, when upon investigation by the The International Movement for the Safety & Protection Of Our Kids & Youth (a/k/a IMSPOOKY), it is deemed that Seymour can no longer live at 43 Old Cemetery Road without his parents. No matter how much Ignatius tries to prove that Seymour is not "unsupervised", but instead is loved and living happily with him, Olive and his cat Shadow, Dick Tater, the head of IMSPOOKY, will not relent and splits up the trio. They'll need some clever and quick thinking in order to get their trio together again and provide their readers with the promised chapters in the book by Halloween or else it will be complete and utter mayhem.

Once again, this series is cleverly written in epistolary fashion. Mostly told through letters, e-mails, drawings, newspaper clippings and Dick Tater's television broadcasts. I absolutely fell in love with the first book in the series and I was not disappointed in this sequel. It is a fun, quick read that is geared more for a younger crowd (3rd to 5th graders) but can definitely be enjoyed by adults as well. My favorite part of the series still remains the names of the characters who reside in the town of Ghastly, IL: Shirley U. Jest, Dick Tater, Claire Voyant, Fay Tality, and of course M. Balm, the librarian! Full of great humor and a very sweet little story that you can devour in an hour flat.

My Rating: