BEHIND THE MAGIC LINE

Disjointed and overambitious, what begins with a lonely young black girl looking for a friend becomes a loosely connected account of moving the family west for a new start, and nothing is really clearer for all the effort. Dozie turns up ""Uncle"" Samuel Dan, formerly a magician's assistant, in a vacant lot and thinks abracadabra is an answer to the family's straitened circumstances. He helps out a little, more as personality than provider, but conditions get worse when Dozie's brother is (unjustly) on the lam. Just then Dad, a traveling man, returns with a plan to move the family west; the trip has some fine family moments except for an unlikely attempted enslavement at gunpoint by a Montana farmer. And when they reach Washington, the only house they can find looks exactly like the one in Dozie's dream. The story should be Dozie's but she loses too much of the limelight to garrulous adults; further, although the episodes are sequential, either the winter or the journey west alone would make a more coherent book.