Dust 'n' Bones

Dust ‘n’ Bones: Ten Ghost Stories

Chris Mould

As the title suggests, this book is a collection of ten ghost stories; a mixture of ones written by Chris Mould and traditional stories that the author has adapted.

The stories are of varying length, allowing some to be slightly longer reads than others.

I used this book to aid with a ghost story writing topic in year six. Although the writing is of a lower reading level than the children were at, there are a lot of good language techniques that could be picked out to demonstrate different writing styles. These include emotive language, good description, figurative language and techniques for building suspense. One short story that I particularly enjoyed was “A Bedtime Tale” by Chris Mould himself. This story was very short, only four pages long, and is very good for demonstrating how you can build suspense in a story and how you can describe a ghost. I read this story aloud to the children as part of a starter to a lesson on describing their own ghosts. The story inspired some brilliant descriptions.

The other stories through this book are just as good. The adaptations show how you can share traditional stories with children, and although they are scary they are not too scary for younger children too.

There are illustrations throughout the books, which add a great deal to the stories. The pages themselves look as though they are worn and old, as if the pages are old and damaged. The text is well presented, with occasional bold words to add further detail and emphasis.

The book has previously won “Year three/four book of the month” on a children’s book review website and I do think the content is suitable for this age range, as well as the reading level.

Mould, C. (2008) Dust ‘n’ Bones: Ten Ghost Stories. London: Hodder Children’s Books.