Twelve-year-old Ali is excited by the prospect of spending the summer at Sycamore Lake, babysitting her four-year-old cousin Emma while her Aunt Dulcie paints at the newly renovated, long-deserted family cottage. But who is the neighbor girl “Sissy,” who wedges herself like a thorn between the two girls? Who is “Teresa,” the girl torn out of a family photograph, and who all the town seems to know about? Why does Ali’s mother refuse to come to the cabin, and why do Dulcie’s paintings suddenly take a dark and watery tone? Signature spooky Hahn sends appropriate shivers up the reader’s spine. If Ali’s insights into Sissy’s psychological problems are surprisingly mature, they’re necessary to render the reader’s delightful fright into a satisfyingly chilly but calm resolution. Not terribly surprising, but it does the trick. (Fiction. 9-13)
Pub Date: May 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-66545-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
Thompson (The Trials of Molly Sheldon, 1995, etc.) shoehorns a novel-sized cast into a short story's worth of plot in this wry tale of a teenager, a pornographer, and a ghost. Anna isn't unhappy that her parents have chosen to move away from a New York suburb to be innkeepers in a small Vermont town, but she is lonely—until the ghost of Roxy Cray, a serving girl who died of a botched abortion in 1818, appears. Their relationship is an unusual one from the beginning; Roxy, who can be solid or invisible at will, helps Anna with housekeeping chores while Anna, after giving her new friend clothes and a makeover, calmly decides that it doesn't matter whether she's imaginary or not. It starts to matter only when Tony, a photographer, after glibly convincing Anna to take off her clothes for some shots, is pushed from a cliff. A witness says that Anna did it. All Anna remembers is hearing him shout as she hid behind a rock. Was it Roxy, or is Anna editing her memory? Thompson adopts a casual, chatty tone that robs the uglier revelations of much of their shock value, and Anna seems far too gullible, but the ghost, a bevy of unconventional guests, and a budding romance in a subplot will keep readers awake. Light fare, with some cautionary undercurrents. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4870-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
An uncomplicated first novel, set in turn-of-the-century South Dakota, about a teenager mad to go fossil-hunting. Despite her Bible-thumping father's sermons on a woman's proper place, Tabitha has managed successful, if surreptitous, rebellion; she can ride and shoot better than her brother and has a good grounding in the sciences. She sneaks off to a lecture by dinosaur hunter Phineas Parker and learns that he plans a nearby dig. He, too, spouts off about women's roles, so she persuades him to hire, sight unseen, her fictional twin ``Tom'' as a scout. Hill contorts the plot to make Tabitha's masquerade easy—her father leaves town as not one but two parties of fossil hunters arrive— and makes it even simpler to tell Good Guys from Bad; Parker is not only sexist, he's lazy, arrogant, flabby, and, as it happens, unethical, while his rival paleontologist, A.V. Harding, is fit, kind, intelligent, and female. When Parker orders a fossil destroyed to throw Harding off the trail, Tabitha unmasks, changes bosses, and declares her independence so vigorously that her previously subservient mother joins her. The story has dramatic moments but struggles beneath the weight of its message; fanatic dinophiles may find more focused books like Kathryn Lasky's Bone Wars (1988) less distracting. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8234-1229-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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