THE ORIGINAL FREDDIE ACKERMAN

Already adrift because of his parents' many divorces and marriages, Trevor ``Freddie'' Ackerman feels stranded by a summer with two elderly aunts on an island in Maine, without TV or other electronic entertainment. Aunt Lou is busy grinding out poems for greeting cards; Aunt Cal, a used-book dealer, offers him the run of her massive library while she conducts her own secretive work. A natural snoop and adventurer (at least in his imagination), Freddie tries to sell one of Aunt Cal's acquisitions (a first- edition mystery) to a ``Bookfinder'' whose ad he's come across. He hopes to use the money to get off the island, but a crisis of conscience prevents him from making the deal; and he'll be both relieved and ashamed when he learns (as readers may have guessed) that the ``Bookfinder'' is Aunt Cal. The story unwinds slowly, in pace with the summer season. Just as leisurely is Freddie's realization of how much he has come to care for the aunts and the island, and how he can make himself a ``home'' wherever he is. A grandly unassuming story, strewn with eccentric personalities, all with their hearts in the right places. (Fiction. 10-14)