A Glimpse of the Magic: The Lost Boy's Gift by Kimberly Willis Holt

There are places where you want to go and places where you want to leave. Sometimes you have no choice in the matter. This was the case for a boy named Daniel.

Daniel is moving, to a smaller house in a smaller town, and he can't take all his favorite things along. His world is shrinking.

He didn't take Snappy the Snail, but he packed his rock collection, his slingshot and skateboard.  He packed the sailboat his dad had given him, promising to find a pond to sail it in together. But he couldn't take his dad along. He had already moved somewhere else.

He packed the only book worth reading, Peter Pan.

But riding his bike down While-A-Way Lane he spots a lemonade stand that says CLOSED FOR SPRING BREAK, a pond where he could sail a boat, and a woman with a big, shaggy dog, talking to something in the grass. She says it's a grass snake, named Isadora.

And that's how he meets Tilda Butter, who nervously gives a spider a spot of tea and a crumb of toasted biscuit with jam as he chats about how his web captured a grasshopper hungrily eyeing Tilda's hosta's big green leaves.

"Yes, indeed," said Spider. You got to keep your perfect hosta and I got a nutritious meal. One must eat one's greens."

With a woman like Tilda to introduce him to the hidden magic of While-A-Way Lane, Daniel comes to see things in Falling Star Valley with new eyes. Tilda lets him walk her big dog Fred, and introduces him to some simple magic like mulch piles that transform garbage into rich dirt and the Woof Woof Wafers that make lay Fred into an obedient dog. He meets the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, Lemonade Girl, Tilda's friends Zip and Zap the squirrel brothers, and dodges the stern-looking piano teacher who pretends to play a shiny saxophone by her window every night. And he discovers the fireflies that swarm over the pond like a cloud of little stars.

Slowly the magic of While-A-Way Lane becomes visible, and when in his new school Daniel gets to play a Lost Boy in the school play Peter Pan, he finds himself an actor, playing a part, because he's not really lost anymore. He's home.

There are said to be people who work magic, and then there are those who can see and feel it, and Tilda Butter is that person for Daniel. Far from the place and people he knows, life had lost its magic and a lost boy needs a woman who talks with snakes and snails to help him find it again, in Kimberley Willis Holt's latest, The Lost Boy's Gift Henry Holt and Company, 2019. Sometimes life loses its sheen and it takes a guide to learn to see it again, and author Holt's novels are always guides to help find the way back to life's magic. Says the Bulletin for the Center for Children's Books, "Holt’s whimsical narrative moves between Daniel’s struggles in his new life, Tilda’s reflections on her old one, and the critters and community that surround them both. . . A smart, hopeful perspective of life on any lane."

Kimberly Willis Holt is the National Book Award-winning author of When Zachary Beaver Came to Town and the noted My Louisiana Sky