THE BOY WHO WASN'T THERE

To Introduce a favorite genre, a three-chapter ghost story- -appropriately set on the bleak and desolate New England coast in a long-ago December. Lonely Sarah, home from boarding school for Christmas, has no one to play with but her puppets. She's brooding on the windy beach when a boy—quite a translucent boy, in Wilhelm's picture, with no footprints—suddenly materializes and predicts that she'll soon have a friend. Later, he appears in her house and takes her to a nearby cottage, where she finds a grieving mother, an ill child who recovers when she sees the puppets and the girl who brought them, and a photo of the mysterious boy—the woman's son—drowned two years ago in trying to save a friend who'd been washed into the sea. The plot is pretty basic, but it gains atmosphere in the telling and in Wilhelm's sweeping, dramatically impressionistic paintings. An enjoyable addition. (Young reader/Picture book. 5-9)