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BLUE SKYE by Lael Littke

BLUE SKYE

By

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1991
Publisher: Scholastic

Still another book that hinges on a child's abandonment by a flighty mother. Like Mama in MacLachlan's Journey (p. 1013), Reanna indulges her wanderlust, leaving Skye, 11, with Grandpa on the Idaho farm where Reanna grew up. Skye has always traveled with her single mother as she moved from one pickup job to another, but now Reanna has married Bill and the two of them have gone off on motorcycles, ostensibly to research a book about odd place names, without admitting to Skye how long their absence will be. Skye plots to follow them in Reanna's old car, but the battery is dead; while she's contriving to replace it, she adopts a family of kittens, gets to know some great aunts, cousins, and a little boy next door--whose history is rougher than hers, but who now lives with a pleasant, earth-motherly friend--and begins to make an accommodation with her gruff but good-hearted grandfather. When she finally gets the car started, she runs over one of the kittens by mistake; the way everyone rallies round to comfort her helps her decide to stay with Grandpa when Reanna turns up and, ungraciously, agrees to take Skye with her. Skye's story doesn't have Journey's power or its elegant craft (few books do), but it's an accessible, warm-hearted tale about finding a home in an extended family of well-individualized characters. Thoughtful and solidly entertaining.