Gave it 4 stars due to childhood nostalgia, growing up I was a bit of a book nerd (still am obviously) but I remembered this book being one of my childhood favorites. Rereading it now, I can see the issues with this book when it came to scene jumping to another scene out of no where but eventually I got use to it,I suppose that was normal for a children/ young adults book during the 1980’s, who knows really. I still enjoyed the story though and I relate a bit to Sara-Kate’s character a bit even as an adult and I felt sorry for her in the end of the book. ( )

In her ragged clothes and oversized boots, Sarah-Kate is a figure of ridicule at school. However, she has a magic elf village in her neglected back yard, as Hillary discovers one day when Sarah-Kate invites her over to see it. The two girls spend the fall "helping" the elves by making tiny improvements to their village, and Hillary hopes, more than anything, to see an elf for herself, if she is careful and quiet and looks deeply at the natural world as Sarah-Kate instructs. Sarah-Kate can be strange and temperamental, but Hillary is completely taken with this new friendship . . . until the day Sarah-Kate disappears.

There are hints of magic to this story, which is what I think I gravitated toward when I read this as a child (I'm pretty certain I read this as a child?), but as an adult it's a darkly bittersweet book about child neglect and a family in need to help. It feels a tiny bit dated now, but there's still the lovely allure of the elf village and the compelling character of Sarah-Kate to give the story its appeal. ( )

Newberry Honor Book!

This is almost or maybe is, a horror story. Hannah, a fourth grade girl is fascinated by the neighbor whose backyard abuts hers, which is wild and trash strewn and harbors an elf village. Sara-Kate the neighbor is a ragged difficult girl repeating 5th grade and shunned by the entire school, but Hannah finds something spending time with her tending the elf-village that her well manicured life does not supply. Short, it ends deliberately inconclusively. ( )

Sara-Kate is a fifth grader who stayed behind a year and everyone knows she's bad news. But one day, she invites fourth-grader Hillary over to see a village built by elves. Hillary's yard, with its carefully tended garden, backs up to Sara-Kate's, which is a mess of weeds and poison ivy, and Hillary is intrigued by the possibility of elves. Though her parents aren't so sure about it, Hillary and Sara-Kate strike up an unlikely friendship and begin to play together in the yard.

This was an odd sort of story that I think perhaps did not work well for me both on audio and as an adult. It left a tension of whether or not the elves were real or just Sara-Kate's imagination (or, perhaps more insidiously, a lie to get Hillary to play with her). Her father is "away on a trip" and her mother doesn't leave the house, which may have seemed like delicious freedom to a child reader and immediately sends up red flags to an adult. The ending is ambiguous in a few ways, both leaving open the possibility of magic and never really resolving Sara-Kate's problems. I think as a result, I would've believed in the magic as a child but I'm left rather unsettled instead. ( )