A Festival of Ghosts, by William Alexander

In A Properly Unhanted Place, by William Alexander, link goes to my review)  young Rosa Diaz was instrumental in dismantling the dangerous barrier that that had been constructed around the town of Ingot to keep the dead away.  But now that the town is properly haunted again, will the living be able to cope?

A Festival of Ghosts (Margaret K. McElderry Books, August 2018)  picks up right after the first book ends.  Rosa is forced to go to the local school, where she must act as a semi-official ghost appeaser; and her role in the whole ghost business has not made her wildly popular with many of the other kids, so there's social as well as spooky tension!

The school is not the only supernatural hot-spot--Ingot is in danger of being overwhelmed by the influx of unsettled spirits, and its inhabitants have lived without having to deal with the dead for so long that they don't know how to cope.  Rosa herself is troubled by the possibility that she herself is being haunted by the ghost of her dead father, and her best friend Jasper and his family are troubled by the haunting that's taken over the grounds of the town's Renaissance festival--spirits of Renaissance re-enactors and the minors of Ingot's past are at war over the site.  And the haunting of the school proves not to be a case of ordinary restless dead, but part of the tragedy at the heart of Ingot's troubled past....

So basically, there's a lot on Rosa's plate!  She and Jasper continue to be a great team, and the details of ghost appeasement make for entertaining reading.  The larger struggle of recognizing history and past wrongs, and making places for those wrongs to be remembered in the landscape of the living, adds a profound and thoughtful depth.

The first book was great spooky fun, this book is perhaps less fun, but possibly even better.

Note--illustrations by Kelly Murphy, one of my favorite middle grade fantasy illustrators, add lots....for those who are better than I am at noticing that there are pictures.  I have to go back and look at the them once I finish the book, because I get so fixed on the reading that I don't even see pictures.  I had not even realized that there were pictures until I started writing this.  This blindness, and my sadness that I have this failing, is why I have organized a panel on "illustrated middle grade" for Kidlitcon 2019, with Kelly Murphy as one of the panelists.  I would like to be able to think more intelligently about the pictures!