A teenager and her mother are caught between opposing forces of nature magic in this atmospheric, if deliberately paced, fantasy. News that her grandfather, a renowned, reclusive painter of fantasy landscapes, is in the hospital draws Cassie and her mother Anne to his isolated farmhouse, which they find in a state of moldy ruin. What’s happened? Shuttling between the farm and the Intensive Care Unit, Cassie encounters one enigmatic sign or eldritch creature after another—most of which no one else, except perhaps her secretive, mercurial mother, seems to notice. A mysterious fiddler, a weirdly seductive biker, a frighteningly violent neighbor, and a strange, spiral garden planted by Cassie’s great-grandmother Hannah are all pieces of a puzzle that isn’t fully assembled until near the end. As it turns out, two powers are struggling for control of one of the few unspoiled places left to them, and Cassie’s Poppy has made a bargain with the more rational, less brutal one that is failing along with his life. With the help of Hannah’s journal, Cassie gradually pieces together her family’s central role in an ancient struggle, and emerges from the deadly climactic confrontation ready to take up the task of protecting the farm’s powerful but fragile residents. Like the tales Cassie remembers her mother telling, this is “filled with wonderment and botany,” as well as music, deep relationships between generations, and complex, evocative magic-working. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03577-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
In her first YA novel, Lewis delivers a deceptively simple, in-depth psychological portrait of an angry girl who finds courage in her dreams of Abraham Lincoln. Meghan, 16, has lost nearly everything she loves. Her mother was killed in a car accident; her brother, Killian, has been psychologically destroyed during his tour of duty in Vietnam; her school has expelled her; her father, whom she calls the Banker, is a constant source of fighting. Early on in life, Meghan exhibited extraordinary talent for and joy in running. As the story opens, she has lost a leg to cancer, and has retreated into rage, refusing to undergo rehabilitation. In the hospital she clings to one remaining love: her affection for Lincoln, who lived in her hometown of Springfield, Illinois. As she ponders scenes from her life and from his, she begins to write postcards to him in which she expresses her frustrations. One night after taking a powerful sleeping pill she finds a visitor in her room: Lincoln himself. Meghan’s postcards have replaced the holy cards she collected as a girl in Catholic school, and she passes on their power to her damaged brother. Lewis’s sentences are as spare as her brief chapters, presenting snapshots of Meghan reminiscent of her postcards. Scenes of anger, sorrow, and fleeting happiness merge to produce recognizable characters who walk and breathe in this impressive first effort. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82852-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
Envisioning a nightmarish future in which children deemed small or otherwise defective are worked to death breaking rocks, and the constant rain is so acid it raises blisters, Rapp (Buffalo Tree, 1997) crafts another lurid shocker. Learning that the coffin maker who has housed her is about to sell her off, 11-year-old Whensday, also known as “33” for the tattoo on her arm, sneaks away. Cataloging the disease, excrement, blood, vomit, mutations, slime, and general filth with matter-of-fact bluntness, she takes temporary shelter from the rain with Honeycut, a huge, dimwitted teenager; tries to escape with another fugitive who dies of ebola-like Blackfrost; is raped by an officer of the brutal local militia; and sees Honeycut stoned to death for killing the man. Whensday tells her tale in a colorful idiolect, mixing dreams and scatological exchanges with Oakley, a tough-talking younger friend. Certain she’s about to die since she can’t stop vomiting, Whensday is rescued by a hidden community of women who clean her up and tell her she’s pregnant—a happy ending, under the circumstances. Often gripping, sometimes blackly funny in a squalid way, this will remind readers of Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker (1980) and other tales of post-apocalyptic devastation. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999
ISBN: 1-886910-42-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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