New South Books
Stephanie Campisi
9781646036752/ July 2026/AUD$24.99, NZD$27.99
Of course I got it read before the stroke of midnight on All Hallows! and what a perfectly delicious ghostly read it is. It is absolutely hilarious throughout but with a gentle thread of grief and yearning underlying that.
Dari’s mum, Celine, is frantically getting her new pastry shop up and running, with high hopes that C’est le Vie will be a huge success. Her business partner, Terrance, is a fine pastrycook and his concoctions are tremendously toothsome [drool over descriptions here]. Dari is 12 and a bit of a loner really, especially at this new school in this new town. Her odd habit of speaking to random nothingness can be off-putting – in fact, most think it quite disturbing, including her mother.
But Dari isn’t speaking to nothingness. Dari is a ghost talker. She can see ghosts and speak to them. Felix, who is the resident ghost of C’est le Vie and has been searching for his famous chocolate gateaux recipe for decades, is the first she meets in Widderwends, but definitely not the last. There’s also Bill, the teen cricketer endlessly failing to catch his last ball in the corridor at school. Bill was technically her first – and only – friend at the new school.
And then she meets neighbour next door to C’est le Vie, Maude Mauffersen who is not a ghost when they first meet, although she is quite shortly afterwards. Maude is, in fact, a ghost finisher. Confused? So was Dari. Sometimes, ghosts need help moving onto their next plane. There is something, some unfinished business, that keeps them in the same place, forever repeating that final action of their lives.
That’s where Maude has come in. Her business is The Unfinished Business, and she’s been helping to finish ghosts for years. But when she tumbles down her stairs the day after meeting Dari, it is she who now has the unfinished business and it is Dari, who is put in charge of it. Throughout the hurly-burly of her first days in the new job, Dari has joined the school orchestra, and discovered down the track a bit that the conductor, eccentric Mr Berezhin, is also a ghost talker. Mina, violinist, is not a ghost talker but is able to capture their images via an old camera she has rescued – inadvertently at first, but with more intent as she and Dari chum up to complete Dari’s mission. Aside from the odd one or two unfinished ghosts, there is the question of the entire old factory full of them – a long sad tragic tale of Widderwends’ past. But it is Dari, Mina along with Trent, Mina’s brother (and, we strongly suspect, the kind of oafish boy who is only pretending to be oafish) who unravel the complications thereof, with quirky Mr Berezhin’s help.
All in all, this makes for absolutely side-splitting laugh-out-loud moments. Underlying all this, is Dari’s own unfinished business regarding her father, whose absence she has felt so keenly for almost her entire life, and not helped by her observations of the growing attachment between her mum and Terrance.
It’s a beautifully gentle exploration of letting go, acceptance and moving on from all angles. I loved it and really look forward to the next instalment. Author Stephanie Campisi (Australian but residing in California) has set it up nicely for a continuation and it will be great fun to see where that takes us.
In the meantime, this a terrific read for your kiddos from around Year 4/5 to Year 7/8 easily. It’s a quirky 5 👻👻👻👻👻rating for a fun spooky read.
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