Things I liked:

1. The suspense of why Raine and her mother go to Sparrow Road for the summer. As I've said before, with everyday life fiction like this, it helps a lot to have some kind of mystery driving the plot and this really worked. Of course, the mystery is solved halfway through, but then you can kind of coast on the strength of the characters and relationships.

2. Raine's development as a writer. The way she asks herself questions like "What was and what will be?' and creates a character, Lyman, that's sort of like an imaginary friend. This book could really inspire kids to write and create art.

3. The writing was very solid. Pretty without being flowery. Raine had a distinct voice.

4. The meditations on being on orphan and what an orphanage is like. There are so many orphans in kid lit and I thought this book offered a very down-to-earth, sad, grounded look at something that, weirdly, can be kind of glamorized in fantasy novels.

( )

good for teens ( )

children's fiction; 12-y.o. child meets estranged father. ( )

Raine O'Rourke and her mother move to an odd artist's colony, Sparrow Road, for the summer. Her mother will be the cook. But Raine quickly realizes that her mother had some sort of ulterior motive for taking this job. The man who runs Sparrow Road is silent, brooding, and seems to know her mother very well. One of the artists seems to have a touch of dementia, and is constantly worried about "the children."
But the main purpose was to give Raine the opportunity to meet her father... a man whose name she has never even been told.
Raine's narration frequently had the voice of a girl several years older than her 12-year-old persona. I often found myself picturing her as a high school age girl instead of a preteen. The orphanage story never seemed to completely meld with the Raine-meeting-her-father story. Still, well told, with a variety of interesting and eclectic characters... mostly likable ones. ( )

The story was pleasant it just moved too slowly for me. ( )