Hank Zipzer collaborators Winkler and Oliver launch the Ghost Buddy series, introducing an endearingly uncool hero with the dorky name of Billy Broccoli. Despite his acute clumsiness and preference for wearing fart-themed T-shirts, Billy is articulate, witty, and good-hearted. None of which, unfortunately, will win him popularity in his new middle school, especially since his mother is the principal. This new series would fall clearly into the genre of silly realistic fiction were it not for the presence of a 113-year-old ghost, Hoover Porterhouse, into whose room Billy has just moved, and who undertakes the task of turning Billy into a hip and agile 11-year-old. After Billy’s initial fright, he accepts the ghost’s company and guidance while Hoover, forever age 14, struggles with his own ghostly goals. An amusing cast of broadly drawn secondary characters play their expected roles—snobby older half-sister, embarrassing mother and stepfather, pretty and kind classmate, and neighborhood bully with an embarrassing secret. Readers will root for Billy to conquer his klutziness as well as the bully; his final feel-good triumph is satisfying. Ages 8–12. (Jan.)

Henry Winkler, creator of Hank Zipzer, has begun another delightful series. In this first installment, Billy Broccoli is a short, smart “good kid,” and these qualities make him unpopular with some of his classmates. When he moves to a new house, he soon discovers he's sharing his room with Hoover Porterhouse (the Hoove), a ghost. The Hoove coaches Billy on how to be tougher, more stylish, and, Billy hopes, more popular. When Billy and the Hoove learn an embarrassing secret about Billy's biggest tormentor, Billy is forced to make an important decision. In the closing, Winkler shares his experiences with dyslexia in a moving and helpful way for young listeners, parents, and teachers. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Eleven-year-old Billy Broccoli's move up to middle school is complicated by a teenage ghost determined to give him lessons in how to be cool. The nerdy lad already has a lot on his plate: new house (with a bedroom done up in pink and lavender), new stepfather and prickly older stepsister, new school whose principal is his mother and nosy, bullying schoolmate Rod Brownstone for a next-door neighbor. It is understandable, then, that he's only temporarily freaked out when hyperconfident former jock Hoover "The Hoove" Porterhouse III, a ghost killed 99 years ago, swims into view and grandly announces that Billy is his special project. It seems that the Hoove has just one more year to pull up his failing celestial grades in "Responsibility" and "Helping Others" or be tied to that house and surrounding property forever--a fate worse than, well…. As it happens, the schooling goes both ways, and by the end not only has Billy been guided away from wearing fart-joke T-shirts and taking tuna sandwiches for lunch, he's shown the Hoove a better way to get Brownstone off his case than responding in kind when the bully engineers a public humiliation. A purposeful but not simplistic opener from the creators of the Hank Zipzer series. (Fantasy. 10-12)