Books with author Stafford Betty

Seventh grader Ben Conover sees people no one else can see. When he confides in his best friend, it's not long before smart phones start lighting up with text messages as the air cackles with gossip and he becomes known in school as the 'Ghost Boy'. Home has become a battle ground between his Mum's acceptance and his Dad's disapproval. Ben desperately seeks his father's approval, and wants to be like a regular twelve-year-old. But he doesn't want to break free from his spirit friend, Abby, who shows up when he is in danger or about to do something wrong. She somehow guides him and he has grown very fond of her. Will Ben's father accept his son's psychic gifts? Can he persuade his father that spirits are real and not just hallucinations? And who exactly is Abby? This is not a typical ghost story designed to give you a quick and forgettable thrill, but a serious novel for all ages about a clairvoyant kid and the remarkable gift he has.

Ghost Boy is a middle grade/young adult paranormal love story. Seventh-grader Ben Conover sees people no one else can see. He can distinguish them from the "regular people" who walk the mall. He has power over dark spirits who aim to harm. He has a deeply loving connection with a spirit girl his same age who visits him, but he has no idea where his feelings come from. Ben's bold adventures, compassionate nature, and eerie encounters with an unseen world are woven together throughout the book. But Ghost Boy is more than a boy-book. Girls will identify with the mysterious heroine whose life in "heaven" leaves her yearning for earth, especially Ben. This multiracial novel does not have the feel of fantasy fiction. By bringing to light the sometimes wondrous, sometimes haunted world of clairvoyant children it has a revelatory quality; it seems real--because it is.

"Miss Stafford writes with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible." --Saturday Review "Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. "--New Yorker Coming of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion, Stafford uncovers and indicts the social forces that require boys to sacrifice the feminine in order to become men and doom intelligent girls who aren't pretty.