THE KEEPSAKE CHEST

At 13, Meg sees nothing good about her parents' decision to leave a fast-track law practice and suburban Denver for life in rural Ohio. She misses the mountains, her friends, and the shopping mall and hates everything about Lebanon—the heat and humidity, the landscape, the old houses, even the smell. The nearest neighbors are seventh-grader Talley and his ancient great-grandmother, Mim, who gives Meg the creeps. But when Meg finds the chest in the attic of her early 1800's farmhouse, she turns to Talley and Mim for help in unlocking its secrets. Their discoveries will prevent a greedy developer from destroying Mim's ancestral home; in the process, Meg realizes ``where she really was. Home.'' The setting here is especially well evoked, while Precek hooks readers with the probable importance of papers that fell from the chest, unnoticed by Meg. The cover art, however, inaccurately depicts both Meg and the chest. Still: an engrossing read for anyone who's ever harbored a treasure-chest fantasy or kept a delicious secret. (Fiction. 10-13)