Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
A girl who doesn't speak uncovers secrets concealed by her older sister and an eccentric neighbor. In a starred review, PW said: "Mahy's exceptional imagination and storytelling prowess will make it difficult for readers to leave this book behind them." Ages 12-up. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 UpThis intriguing novel will be welcomed by Mahy's fans and by those who enjoy thought-provoking fiction. She touches on various topics including family dynamics, child abuse, and gender roles, while simultaneously exploring themes of self-realization and individuation. Hero, the narrator, reflects on her 12th year when a series of unusual events changed her life. At home, the abrupt return of her older sister, Ginevra, creates both joy and stress in the Rapper family. Meanwhile, Hero's leafy hideaway in the parklike grounds of a neighboring house becomes the setting for a parttime job as well as the scene of violence and despair. Working as a gardener for the eccentric Miss Credence, Hero is at first unaware of the misery and madness that surround her. Skillful foreshadowing, however, prepares readers for the book's shocking revelations. Parallels between Ginevra and Miss Credence, neither of whom were able to live up to their parents' unrealistic expectations; and between Hero, mute by choice, and Jorinda, Miss Credence's unacknowledged daughter who is locked in silence by severe neglect and possible brain damage, provide plenty of food for thought as the story builds to a crescendo. Despite the serious subject matter, the book is neither grim nor hopeless. Hero finds the strength to communicate verbally again and to resist her unintentionally overbearing mother as she develops her own personality and values. Deft characterization, smooth writing, and a totally original and absorbing worldview make this another fine book by the versatile Mahy.Lisa Dennis, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 7^-10. Mahy's new novel tells of a young woman's quest for individuality and personal power. Hero, the narrator, is the third child of four. Her mother is a university professor famous for her child-rearing theories; her father is a househusband. Mahy makes frequent reference to the invisible technological web descending over us all (computers, modems), yet in the past three years, Hero has spoken aloud only to her older brother, only when they are alone. In her narrative, Hero differentiates between her real life, or the life she lives with her family, and her true (inner and partly invented) life. Exploring the forest of a nearby mansion, Hero encounters the eccentric Miss Credence, who offers the girl a gardening and housekeeping job. Hero, who has heard thin cries that melt into nothing near Miss Credence's house, hears them again while dusting the study. Inexorably drawn by a series of clues that piques her inquisitiveness, Hero uncovers Miss Credence's terrible secret--her teenage daughter, chained since infancy to a bed in a locked tower. Mahy weaves into the story Hero's love of fairy tales, including "Jorinda and Joringel" and "Bluebeard," with a victim reminiscent of Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre. The language of Mahy's novel and its themes, which span a wide range of human experience--forced alienation, madness, personally chosen silence, the intricacies of family life, the plugging into our contemporary electronic hive--demand a thoughtful reader. However, the story's gothic tone and vivid sense of impending menace as well as Hero's quest for identity will pull motivated readers into Mahy's enthralling and beautifully written novel. --Merri Monks
Horn Book Review
From the very first page of this intriguing novel, twelve-year-old Hero makes clear the distinction between real life and true life, the latter being the life of the imagination and the one that has the greater hold on her. A middle child in a family of child prodigies, she has not spoken for several years. She seems to live on the periphery of her family, observing but rarely participating in the daily interactions between her mother, a famous child psychologist, educator, and writer; her father, who performs the domestic duties; her older brother and sister, who have lived and suffered in the spotlight of early achievements; and a younger sister who cultivates the dictionary as a gardener does a vegetable patch. Hero has, apparently, elected to be speechless in a family of articulate geniuses as a way of establishing her own unique identity. But her "true" life revolves around the activities at a stately old house in her neighborhood. Hero has taken to scaling its garden walls by climbing some overhanging tree limbs and observing from her arboreal perch eccentric old Miss Credence feeding the birds in the garden below. The day she falls from a tree and lands at the woman's feet begins a perilous journey for the young protagonist. Miss Credence hires her to tend the garden, and as she follows Hero around at her duties, making progressively odder demands, Hero begins to realize that the woman is truly mad, but she cannot tear herself away. In the end she is drawn into a tower room where she discovers a hidden daughter that the woman has kept from the world for years. When her life becomes endangered, Hero uses her wits - and her voice - to save herself. As she did in Dangerous Spaces (Viking), Mahy explores the ways in which an interior life can take hold of a person, and the dangers that can arise when the lines between the real and the imaginary become blurred. Here again she rescues her heroine just in time, creating an exciting adventure story in the process. n.v. Martha Moore Under the Mermaid Angel Thirteen-year-old Jesse finds life pretty boring until Roxanne moves into the trailer next door. There is nothing much to do in Ida, Texas, except visit Mr. Arthur's wax museum with its two-headed chicken, a collection of baseball caps cut out of construction paper, and the main attraction, a replica of the Last Supper presided over by a mermaid angel. Jesse's mother is not thrilled about her daughter's friendship with a grown woman, particularly one who has the Liberty Bell tattooed on her chest, but Roxanne, who understands that "friendship is measured by heart-time, not clock-time," knows what really matters. Together, they watch for meteor showers. They help Mr. Arthur, who has Alzheimer's, finish cutting out his baseball caps. Roxanne even shows Jesse the human side of Franklin Harris, the biggest jerk in the eighth grade. Most important, Roxanne is the one person Jesse can talk to about her baby brother who died six years ago. The characters are a refreshing and original bunch: Debbie Bartacelli, the new girl in school, has a disfigured face and a towering intellect matched only by her cool self-assurance. Jesse's redoubtable five-year-old sister, Doris Ray, is a thorn in her side most of the time, but unhesitatingly loyal in emergencies. With its saucy first-person narrative and irresistible plot, the book will jump off the shelves. Winner of the Delacorte Press Prize for a First Young Adult Novel, it heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent. n.v. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Ice Unable to come to terms with her father's desertion, Chrissa has barely spoken to her mother, Lorraine, since she entered junior high school. In desperation, Lorraine sends her to stay with her grandmother for a year, and Chrissa doesn't argue, hoping secretly that she can coax her father's whereabouts out of Gram. Once ensconced in the dilapidated old house at the edge of the woods, however, Chrissa finds other matters coming to the fore, chief among them the hold that Sister Harmony, a faith healer, seems to have over her grandmother. The rotund, sanctimonious woman and her seedy nephew frequently enter the house unannounced and have apparently been given sizable sums of money by Gram, who can ill afford it. When Chrissa discovers that her grandmother is planning to deed her woodlands to Sister Harmony, she is even more determined to find her father. Now that she is living in his boyhood home, hints about the man she barely knew begin to mount up, though Chrissa is not always open to the evidence around her. A mild romantic interest in the boy who lives on the adjacent farm and a harrowing episode with the deranged father of two children that she is baby-sitting fill out the narrative; the latter incident offers edge-of-the-seat excitement as Chrissa musters her resources to outwit the man and rescue herself and her charges. Naylor's deft use of foreshadowing, the tension created by the imagery of ice and cold that runs like a leitmotif throughout the book, and the many fine characterizations make the book more than a one-time read. Flashbacks in which Chrissa recalls countless brief but devastating interactions with her father are clear signals to the reader, and finally to Chrissa, that her quest was really a search for herself. By the time she discovers that he is in a penitentiary, the knowledge can do her little harm. n.v. Louise Plummer The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman In her prologue, narrator and protagonist Kate Bjorkman claims, "This is one of those romance novels . . . that disgusting kind with kisses that last three paragraphs." Well - not exactly. While the chapters are interspersed with "revision notes" to give the appearance of a romance novel in progress, Kate is a much more complex heroine than those of the typical Harlequin fare, and the supporting cast of characters is more developed as well. A self-professed "amazon" at six feet tall, and nearly blind without her thick glasses, Kate is bright and literate and shares her father's passion for linguistics. The not-so-unlikely romance begins when Kate's brother comes home from college with his best friend, Richard, with whom Kate has been infatuated since childhood. Richard's beautiful, ethereal friend Fleur St. Germaine initially appears to fulfill the role of antagonist in the plot, but she soon becomes a good friend and ally to Kate. The real villain is quickly revealed to be Kate's supposed best friend, Ashley - an evil temptress and a force to be reckoned with. The heroine, of course, vanquishes her enemy in the end and wins the hero's heart, but not without experiencing some hurt. Through observations of her newlywed brother and his wife and of her parents' long-standing marriage, Kate also learns that relationships are complicated and require hard work rather than easy appeasement. Kate is the fortunate member of a creative, loving, and supportive family; the story is set over a snowy, idyllic Christmas and New Year's in Minnesota, where "Californicated" Fleur has come to witness a perfect Christmas. Plot tensions notwithstanding, Plummer's novel is filled with the "light, warm air" that spills from the Bjorkmans' home. The holiday cheer, the appealing protagonist, and the happy ending are sure to evoke the simple pleasures of popcorn and cocoa on a cold winter's day. l.a. Marsha Qualey Hometown As the Persian Gulf War looms on the horizon, sixteen-year-old Border moves from Albuquerque to his father's hometown in Minnesota, which his dad hasn't seen since he went to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Border and his free-spirited parents have moved around often, but ever since his parents' divorce, he has lived primarily with his father. His mother's career as a political activist and performance artist has caused him some personal embarrassment, and adult supervision from either parent has been rare. Border, who is a gifted musician, is used to cutting school at will and playing his recorder on street corners for money. The move to a small town where he is under the almost constant scrutiny of neighbors comes as a rude shock. Eventually, Border develops a close friendship with schoolmate Jacob and his sister. He even comes to appreciate the constant watchful maternal eye of Connie, an old family friend who lives across the street. On the other hand, Border is unnerved by the strangers who accost him in stores or in school for his father's actions during a war that seems like ancient history. Employing a casual but engaging narrative voice, Qualey creates a subtle, somewhat elusive, portrayal of her young protagonist and makes some telling comments about the disconnection of modern families who communicate largely through electronic means. In the end, small-town intimacy forces Border into a confrontation not only with his father's past but with his own present, and into the realization that he has settled in a place that, for good or ill, is his hometown, too. n.v. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Book Review
The Rappers--one of the most endearingly quirky families on record in seasons--are all gifted and a little idiosyncratic. Mother Annie is a bestselling authority on child-rearing; father Mike loves being a househusband; older sister Ginevra, after leaving the family in a snit, now makes ``pots of money'' in Australia; brother Athol always has his head in a book; younger sister Sap adores using arcane words; and Hero has not spoken a word in three years. When two things happen--Ginevra returns and Hero takes a job with Miss Credence, who lives down the street--to disturb the relative calm in the Rapper household, readers will find themselves in the midst of Mahy (The Greatest Show Off Earth, 1994, etc.) at her best. Fascinating characters, a profound mystery, agonizing suspense only made bearable by the right doses of humor, a palpable atmosphere of dread, and a shocking denouement lead to only one conclusion: Mahy is a writer who just keeps getting better with every book. (Fiction. 10+)
TextPublication details: New York : Viking, 1995.Description: 170 p. ; 24 cmISBN: