Somewhere in Africa by Ingrid Mennen and Niki Daly, illustrated by Nicolaas Maritz, 1990.
I didn’t read this book when I was a child, although it’s old enough that I could have, but I was fascinated when I found it in a Little Free Library because this is an American edition of a book that was originally from South Africa. I enjoyed the colorful painted pictures, and I think it’s a good book for explaining to American children what it would be like to be a kid in South Africa. For a child living in a city, life actually wouldn’t be too different from the lives of American children living in cities. Africa isn’t all savannas and animal safaris.
A boy named Ashraf lives in Africa. He doesn’t live in a place with lions, crocodiles, and zebras, though. He lives in a very busy city. Ashraf likes animals, and he reads about them in his favorite library book.
As Ashraf goes to the library, he sees all of the busy traffic of the city and passes by shops with fascinating things in their windows. In the market, there is a fruit seller singing about his products. Other people are selling flowers, and there are street musicians.
When Ashraf gets to the library, he checks out the same book about African animals again.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
It’s 1851, and Professor Carver of Boston is living in an apartment above a candle shop with his wife and two children, his son Jamie and daughter Lorna. One day, a man named Mr. Giddings comes to see Professor Carver to request his help. For years, he has wanted to buy a particular farm with a beautiful house called Windy Hill. However, when he finally succeeded in buying the house and he and his wife went to live there, his wife became very upset. She said that she felt strange in the house and that she had seen a ghost. Now, she is too upset to return to Windy Hill. Mr. Giddings has heard that Professor Carver once helped a friend get rid of a ghost haunting his house, and he asks the professor if he would be willing to do the same for him.
Jamie and Lorna are thrilled by the house, which is much bigger than their apartment in town. They can each have their own room, and there is an old tower in the house that was built by a former owner, who was always paranoid about Indian (Native American) attacks (something which had never actually happened). However, their new neighbors are kind of strange. Stover, the handyman, warns them that the house is haunted and also tells them about another neighbor, Miss Miggie. Miss Miggie is an old woman who wanders around, all dressed in white, and likes to spy on people. There is also a boy named Bruno, who apparently can’t walk and often begs at the side of the road with his pet goat, and his father, Tench, who is often drunk and doesn’t want people to make friends with Bruno.
Then, strange things do start happening in the house. The quilt that Lorna has been making disappears and reappears in another room in the middle of the night. At first, the family thinks maybe she was walking in her sleep because she had done it before, when she was younger. However, there is someone who has been entering the house without the Carvers’ knowledge, and Jamie and Lorna set a trap that catches the mysterious “ghost.”
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