loganberry books
A note to myself about books to query Loganberry Books about:
A (Elizabethan?) ghost dwells in a manor, newly restored and about to be inhabited. He is an actual ghost but, contrary to reputation, his bloodstain on the kitchen hearth can be scrubbed away, which the new, no-nonsense residents proceed to do. In addition to dryly witty, he is curmudgeonly and determined not to be ignored so repaints the stain in whatever paint he can find, and eventually runs out of kid's sanguineous pigments and resorts to vermillion or fucshia before he can get the family to believe in him instead of blaming the stain's reappearance on each other's pranks. There's more to it than that, but that's the only bit I remember. Not spooky at all, more about learning to change with the times and get along with others. For 9- to 12-year-olds? Set in England. Published in the '70s or early '80s. The cover might have been the transparent face of the ghost looking out a window.
Solved: Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost." I came across this title while searching likely terms but dismissed the possibility as not a children's book and not the right period. But Jessie suggested it and at that point I bothered to search within its text for "paint." That's the one, and now I wonder how and when I came across it. A short story is not at all what I remember, and a genre I eschewed as a child. I guess I am content having false or unreliable memories as long as, when they're proven wrong, I realize it. But the faint visual memory of a (cover?) illustration and the stronger recollection of its being a book-length tale aren't resolving into Oscar Wilde. Plus it means "The Importance of Being Earnest" is not the first Wilde I read. Wild.
I am glad I at least remembered the ghost as being dryly witty: the vital Wilde characteristic.
Marketable in Judy Blume's wake. A boy in his early teens learns that his mother is not just not feeling well but mortally sick. A doctor tells him and his father that she has a 25% chance, and he asks, "Of dying?" and is told no, of living. Somehow I associate this protagonist with a character who thinks all board games except Monopoly are "bored games," but that might be the protagonist of Don't Play Dead Before You Have To.
