The Haunted Playground
by Shaun Tan
Stone Arch Books, 1998
80 Pages
Ages 10 and up
Reading Level: 2-3
To understand this book completely, you have to take it in context. The Haunted Playground is one book in a series by Capstone Publishing designed to be used in the classroom, targeted at reading assessment. It is beyond the graded easy readers you see with big 2s and 3s in the corner, but it’s written in the same style.
The book is really just a short story packaged independently, with a glossary at the back and a set of questions for the teacher to use as a study guide.
I am a big fan of Shaun Tan, holding his Tales from Outer Suburbia and Lost and Found to be some of the greatest speculative fiction since Neil Gaiman.
Gavin, a kid with a habit of frequenting playgrounds after dark to sweep them with a metal detector runs into a sand lot that gives no readings. Soon, the playground is overrun with kids his age, who invite him to play. He says he has to get home the first time, but then finds himself returning the very next night, playing an endless game of keep away.
The ringleader is a tough girl named Andrea, who remorselessly cajoles Gavin into staying out later than he ever planned. You see, the treasures people have lost in the sand aren’t really lost, he discovers. Like the children, somehow cursed to play here forever, the trinkets return to the sand each night only to disappear again once the spotlight goes out at dawn.
Andrea sure doesn’t feel like a ghost when she knocks Gavin into the dust. Should he stay, or will his first all-nighter turn into his last?
This is some of Tan’s earlier work, and though the illustrations are enjoyable, the story lacks sophistication. (As one might well expect for a level-3 reader.) The ending is both confusing and stiff, like the story is being forced to end before its time, and it leaves the protagonist hanging.
This was published almost ten years before Tan’s landmark The Arrival, and should not be considered representative of his work. Go out and get Lost and Found, where Tan’s illustrations lead the story, and I promise you will be filled with the due sense of awe and wonder he can truly inspire.
If you are a parent looking for something not-too-spooky for your five year-old to learn to read with on the other hand, this is the one.
 
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