RIALTO

On a family vacation to an abandoned theme park, two sisters join a quest to right an old wrong and bring Rialto Park back to life.

Fourteen-year-old Ivy Vicar, who loves family traditions, and her 12-year-old sister, Dahlia, an artist who gets help from a therapist to manage her anxiety, arrive with their parents in Missouri, where they’re staying with family friends the Forwanders. Ivy and Dahlia accompany 14-year-old Remy Forwander as he distributes bequests for his late honorary aunt, Jess, who included letters that express her feeling of guilt over the park’s demise when it was rapidly subsumed by a forest. But the kids realize that—as in Tales of the Marchen Wood, the book of folklore Rialto Park was based on—this isn’t the whole story. This mystery drives the book through its powerful final section, in which the quality of ferly, “a mix of the uncanny, the strange, the wondrous,” really takes flight. The book is divided into three parts, and character development and worldbuilding are initially foremost, while the mystery and fantasy elements gain in prominence in the middle section, setting up for a magical resolution. This stand-alone work includes many references to characters from Milford’s The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which reward loyal readers, along with nods to Narnia and Winnie-the-Pooh. Ivy and Dahlia present white, and Remy is Black.

“Once upon a time, it was magical”: true of the book and its setting alike.