POSSIBLES

Her beloved father recently dead, Sheppy Lee faces a summer of sorrow and diminished means. Instead of going to camp, Sheppy takes a job as a companion to Constance, a young white woman with a broken leg, a crabby disposition, and a mysterious past. At the same time, Sheppy's brother, Ranger, seems to be drifting, no one speaks of her father, and she finds a cache of poetry she never knew he had written. Poetry and mystery are the heart of this poignant novelthe poetry her father loved and wrote, the mystery of life that makes people more than the sum of their parts. Sheppy slowly realizes that few people are what they seem: not her father, with his secret writing; not her brother, with his hidden pain; not Constance, with her tragic love; not even her friends and enemies from school. From the author of Mayfield Crossing (1993), a lovely, lyrical story of love, loss, and the nobility that exists in others once we look beyond their masks. (Fiction. 8-12)