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"A simultaneously sensitive and ridiculous romp."
--Publishers Weekly
This is the story of nine-year-old Dennis, his dog Bo, and a ghost visitor. Dennis has been visited by ghosts before, but this one is his Uncle Arvie, who seems to want something and who talks strangely, as in: "Fraggle pin Heartfoot a wig pasta." Dennis unravels Arvie's words and helps him complete three tasks.
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The dog, Bo, is named after a neighbor's dog, but has the personality of a golden retriever we once had. People often ask where Uncle Arvie's strange words came from. Most of them just popped into the air. For some, I wanted words that either sounded like or began with the same letter as the 'real' word. For example: pepperoni for papa; macaroni for mama; dinosaur for Dennis. Other words just sounded funny, like wig pasta and deester.
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Three rather different things came together to inspire this book:
1. I'd been teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play in which, early on, a ghost (Hamlet's father) appears, and my class had been talking about why ghosts (if there are such things) might arrive. One reason, we speculated, was because they needed help in completing an unfinished task.
2. My father, Arvel, had a stroke, which left him unable to speak correctly. Sometimes the sounds and words that came out of his mouth were both funny (their sounds) and sad (because he couldn't' say what he meant.)
3. After my father died, my mother found a love letter he had written her fifty years earlier. As I reread that letter, I had the reassuring feeling that he was there again, in the room. So out of that came the story of the ghost of Uncle Arvie, who can't speak correctly, and who visits his nephew Dennis, in hopes that Dennis can help him complete three unfinished tasks. One of these involves a love letter to his wife.
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