DISCOVERING PIG MAGIC

First-person narrator Mattie, just 13, and her closest friends Ariel and Nicki find themselves trying to negotiate the wide chasm between childhood and adolescence with a bit of magic. Each girl has a worry, from Mattie’s mother’s agoraphobia to Nicki’s baby brother’s defective chromosome syndrome and Ariel’s worry over a plagiarized, contest-winning recipe. Their ritual burying of important small objects (a pig figurine from Mattie’s collection, Ariel’s antique spoon, Nicki’s doll) is meant to free them from their worries and solve their problems, but as events progress their fears seem to multiply. In the end it’s clear that the greatest power the girls have is their friendship for each other and their growing insight into what they can and can’t control. Crabtree’s portrayals both of the charm and power of friendship and of the internal emotional life of a young teen are deft and complex, and her confident pacing never drags. (Fiction. 10-14)