It Takes An Island: When the Babies Came to Stay by Christine McDonnell

THE FIRST ARRIVED ON THE MAIL PLANE. THE HARBORMASTOR OPENED A CANVAS BAG. INSIDE WAS A SQUALLING, RED-FACED BABY.

THE NEXT TWO CAME ON THE FERRY.

THE FISHERMAN FOUND THE FOURTH, ASLEEP ON A PILE OF NETS, SMELLING FAINTLY OF MACKEREL.

The babies each had a note asking someone to take good care of them, but the harbormaster, the ferryman, and the fisherman said they had their own work to do. The mayor said he was much too important. But the librarian thought the babies should stay on their safe little island. Who could take them? The Librarian usually knew the answers to questions.

"I'LL DO IT MYSELF," SAID THE LIBRARIAN.

She made a nursery for the babies in a freshly-painted storeroom. The Fisherman made rocking cribs from lobster traps and the Mayor rocked them whle he read his important newspaper. The others provided coverlets and curtains made from canvas and fishnets. The Librarian named them alphabetically--Agatha, Bram, Charles, and Dorothy. She called them A, B, C, and D, and said their last name was "Book." The babies grew and thrived. As time passed they learned to walk, led by Bram. Their rescuers taught them sea chanties and how to blow the ferry horn and how to tie many kinds of knots, and the mayor let them spin in his important desk chair.

The Librarian, of course, taught them to read.

When they started to school, a few kids asked them why they lived at the Library.

"WHERE ARE YOUR REAL FAMILIES?"

And the Librarian, who usually knew the answers to questions, told them they were the Book Family and the island was their home, in Christine McDonnell's sweetly moving When the Babies Came to Stay (Viking Books, 2020).

With a dreamlike, almost fairy-tale story of foundlings taken in and raised on a kind and close-knit island, what would seem to be a perilous fate turns into a nurturing community in which the adorable foundlings, pictured in Jeanette Bradley's intimate and outstanding art, find reassuring love and stability, a place where they truly belong, something all children crave. Kirkus Reviews says, "While the fantasy plotline of the babies' arrivals is whimsical, the story is grounded in an emotional reality that will appeal to and delight children. Charming and lighthearted with broadly applicable messages of love and acceptance."

Porcine Eccentric: Business Pig by Andrea Zuill

One morning at the Sunshine Sanctuary for Farm Animals, Jelly Bean the sow gave birth to a litter of piglets.

Right away the volunteers noticed something unusual.

One of the piglets arrived wearing a dark suit and tie and equipped with a briefcase. The volunteers are quickly convinced that this little porcine protagonist is clearly an outlier.

Unlike his siblings, he sips coffee from a white porcelain mug and is too fastidious to grub around in the muck, preferring a shovel to his snout for rooting up grubs.

"I believe what we have here is a gen-u-wine business pig," drawled one of the volunteers.k

The conscientious volunteers construct him an office in an empty stall, with a square bail of hay for a desk, an executive chair, and a computer of his own. Jasper is pleased.

They let him help with the bookkeeping.

And this porker is a worker! Jasper keeps busy tabulating data, totaling his entries, charting his figures in bar graphs, line graphs, and pie graphs, posting flow charts in prominent places. But the stock and the stockholders are unimpressed.

The goat ate his business card.

Little Jasper doesn't quite fit in into the bucolic setting.

His only hope for full employment is to get adopted. He throws himself into an advertising campaign to market his skills. He persuades the local media to feature him. The cows graze in sandwich signs touting his qualifications. He nails posters with tear-off phone numbers onto telephone poles.

Finally Jasper's campaign draws a promising applicant, a woman with a bespectacled little girl who carries... a briefcase!

He was pleased to see she was actually studying his charts! She wanted to exchange business cards. Then she requested his resume'.

A contract is signed, and it's a match made in business school heaven, in Andrea Zuill's forthcoming Business Pig (Sterling, 2018)l the story of a maverick porker who finds the perfect partnership placement.

Author Zuill's comic but understated text is well-paced to set off her delightful design, varying spot art drawings with full-bleed pages which set off her subtle but droll blackline illustrations that invite lingering over each page. A satisfying picture book outing with the premise of placing a square peg in just the right hole.

Unexpected Guests: Ghosts of Greenglass House by Kate Milford

"You want to see this, Milo!" Mr. Pine called. "A real Nagspeake Christmas tradition. We're about to get a visit from the Waits, to bring good luck for the coming year."

There was a jangling, and something else... was it music? The lights bobbed and dodged, and as the lights emerged from the woods, so did the people. There were seven, one of them with a ring around its head like a crown and a small forking branch hung with candles.

And then the final figure, a ghostly horse, shrouded in layers of white that caught the moon-and fire-glow like ice. Its head was a grinning skull with candles in the eye sockets and stag's antlers glowing gold. The head tossed and the jaw clacked open and shut as the creature walked along.

Milo Pine's school holidays have just begun and he has been hoping for a quiet family Christmas this year at Greenglass House, a very old inn on the rugged southern coast of England. This year there is only one guest, a vague young man named Emmett, seemingly obsessed with sketching the ancient stained-glass windows that give the inn its name--that is, until the place is invaded by two of last year's most unusual guests, two young women, Georgie and Clem, self-proclaimed thieves, who quietly admit that they need a place to lie low for a few days. Once the home of Doc Holystone, a legendary smuggler captain, Greenglass House is no stranger to secrets, and in short order, more unexpected guests show up for dubious reasons. Milo, who has looked forward to time alone with his parents, is both sad and annoyed.

And then the Waits appear, a motley collection of mummers from a local "asylum" called The Liberty, whose Advent visits are a tradition drawn from ancient times. Caroling is a minor activity for this band, and one of them, Rob, dressed as the "sweeper" gets busy with his duties of sweeping the chimney to bring good luck to Greenglass House in the new year. Rob, however, is a novice sweeper and the downstairs is soon filled with smoke and soot to be cleaned up, and the Pines find themselves suddenly hosting the weird Waits for the night as well.

Then Georgie and Clem confide that their "haul," historic navigational implements from the stash of the infamous smuggler Violet Cross, have been stolen from their rooms, implicitly by one of the guests, and then two of the women guests are battered by an unseen hand. Unwillingly, Milo finds himself drawn into this mystery, and to his delight, finds himself joined in his investigations by Meddy, the ghost of Doc Holystone's daughter, who has not materialized since the previous Christmas.

It's not your usual Christmas story. Greenglass House at Christmas is a place where no one is quite who or what they seem, a place for shape-shifting spirits, a place where the past and the present overlap and layer themselves in a frosty, misty setting that seems unmoored in time. On one level Milo and Meddy assume the identities and powers of Tengfei and Sirin, in a Dungeons and Dragons-like game, while the real Milo himself worries over his own dual identity as an Asian child adopted by pair of English innkeepers and Meddy is haunted by her inability to be reunited with the ghost of her father Doc Holystone. And still, the holy grail strangely sought by all of the mystery visitors is a legendary map of the Skedwrack River estuary, with its shifting shoals and channels, an actual yet metaphorical artifact somehow able to represent the myriad changes in navigable waters that their famous smugglers sought.

And those are only some of the mysteries found in Kate Milford's just published Ghosts of Greenglass House (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2017), the sequel to last year's Greenglass House, winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for mysteries. Some secrets are revealed in this second book, with its dense, convoluted plot that often floats somewhere in that realm of "a willing suspension of disbelief," making for an absorbing supernatural detective story, albeit one with a quite down-to-earth bit of sleuthing involving a traditional Advent food. Milo is a complex character, living in what he feels are two worlds in more ways than one, of Chinese heritage in a very English village, on the cusp of childhood and adult life, and aware of the ghosts from a past that are always an active force in the living present. For young readers who like to curl up over the holidays with a complex mystery novel that takes them into a very different world, this one is a must read.

Only Connect: Greenglass House by Kate Milford

Milo grabbed his boots and ducked outside before anyone could ask him where he was going, passing his father busy stacking firewood, and sprinted down the path and into the woods.

He found the paperback right away, wedged between the Whilforber Whirlwind and the edge of the wooden floor. He must have dropped it when the tower of luggage had come tumbling down. He was just about to head back inside when he spotted something else on the steel tracks.

It looked like a blue leather wallet, only bigger. Milo climbed down onto the rails behind the car and picked it up.

And that's how he found the first map.

The paper was old and green-tinged. It was brittle and delicate. Milo held it up so that the light from the closest lamppost shone through, and he could just make out a watermark: it looked like a wrought-iron gate, but warped and wrenched out of its original shape.

It was then that Milo realized what he was looking at.

It is the beginning of Christmas break, and Milo Pine is looking forward to spending the snowy holidays quietly with his family in their inn. Known locally as the "smuggler's inn," the Pines' Greenglass House rarely had holiday guests, smugglers or otherwise, but just as Milo settles in to enjoy his vacation, the visitors' bell rings and two unusual guests arrive in the lift from the village below. The two elderly passengers. Mrs. Hereward and Mr. Vinge, commence shouting violently at each other over their mixed-up luggage. Hardly had Mrs. Pine soothed their ruffled feathers with cups of tea than more unexpected guests arrive, two young women, the blue-haired Georgie, who informs Milo, carrying her bags upstairs, that she is a thief, and the red-haired Clem, who flies effortlessly and  soundlessly up the always creaky old stairs and describes herself as a cat burglar. Then in short order, Mrs. Carraway, a village woman hired to help with the kitchen work, arrives with a young girl, who calls herself Meddy, and yet another guest, the fusty Dr. Gowerwine.

Milo falls asleep by the fire reading The Raconteur's Commonplace Book, loaned to him by Georgie, and wakens to find Meddy looking at him curiously and holding the blue wallet.

"So you're adopted, then?" she asked. "I heard you were."

Milo is annoyed. So, he's obviously Chinese and his parents are just ordinary locals. Nice of her to point it out. But then, as she opens the wallet and studies the fragile old map inside, she comes up with an intriguing idea.... a campaign, a role-playing game of Odd Trails, to discover the meaning of the map and the true mission of the person who lost it in the snow.

"We're stuck here, right? Might as well do something fun." she said.

Reluctantly, Milo agrees. But as Meddy explains that the two of them must take on a new personas, avatars, he as Negret, the escaladeur, and Meddy as Sirin, the scholiast, Milo finds himself intrigued with his new persona as lock picker, athletic burglar. and adventurer, and agrees to play the game.

And as events unfold, it seems that their guests are not what they seem either. Milo's map is stolen first from its hiding place beneath the carpet, and then each of the guests have something taken from their rooms, each object with a connection to the old inn. And as Milo and Meddy work together to discover everyone's purpose, they discover that each one of them as well is connected in the most odd ways with Greenglass House, and not just the oceanside inn it now is. Milo learns that the inn was the one-time mansion of the notorious smuggler, Doc Holystone, whose map leads to a sort of treasure after all, not a runner's hoard, but a bequest for his daughter, who herself died in a fall the night a customs officer chased Doc Holystone over the cliff.

Unleashing the tangle of connections between everyone there and their relation to the cypher hidden in the stained glass windows of the old house leads Milo to an insight into his own heritage and of Meddy's true identity, one that will reward readers with a last surprising revelation in the story's dramatic and satisfying conclusion.

Forthcoming today, Kate Milford's Greenglass House (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2014), set within the Gothic background of an old inn with its own secrets and a strange assortment of snowbound guests, all seeking some revelation hidden in the history of the old house, is a layered, slow-developing story that unwinds the connections between each character in fascinating fashion, saving the inn's deepest secret for last.

An atmospheric mystery and tale of the past in which the old mansion itself is almost a character, part role-playing game and part family story, with overlays of smuggling lore, Milford's engrossing story will appeal to fans of supernatural history mysteries such as Mary Downing Hahn's All the Lovely Bad Ones, and The Old Willis Place, Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society and sequels,  the several books in series, written by a stable of famous authors, The 39 Clues, Pseudonymous Bosch's Secret series or Lissa Evans' Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms: Magic, Mystery,  and a Very Strange Adventure.

Coming Home: Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge

Mom leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "I'd forgotten how rough it was when you first got here," she said. "Those first few months, I thought we were going to spend our lives trying to coax you out of hiding."

I sat still on the couch after the door shut behind her. Thoughts tumbled around in my head, fell down into the hollow, scooped-out space inside me.

I'd had a home by a wide, tea-colored river. I'd had Grandmother and Ma. Before my baby book started when I was six, before I used to hide in my closet, I'd been a baby to someone else.

The summer between elementary and junior high school only adds to Tracy's feeling of being neither here nor there. But when scavenging for materials to build their own Viking funeral ship, she and her friend Stargazer find an old ammo chest among her father's tools and inside it a pair of Army dogtags and a worn photo of her dad and two Vietnam War buddies, she knows that what is there is part of her feeling of personal limbo.

Her father is furious when he catches them with the box and snatches it away. But like Pandora's box, the ghosts that are released from that place cannot be put back. A river of memories come flooding back in Tracy's mind, no longer hidden in the closet of her mind.

Dad was totally wrong if he thought he could just shove the ammo box on some shelf and life would go on like before. Something had been trapped in the box --maybe hopes and dreams and fears--and now they were out a blowing around us, skittering between us all.

Now the past--her past before she was six and taken to be adopted in California--comes back to Tracy, memories of her mother, who worked for the Americans and came home with presents from the PX and hugs for her only on holidays, of Grandmother, who consoled her when people called her con-lai and whispered that she got her brown hair and light eyes from an American father, and worst of all, how the soldiers of Uncle Ho came, killed her uncle, and took Grandmother away while she hid under the bed, and how the big Americans took her away from the house on the edge of the river. Now Tracy understands her feeling of being separate, somewhere between two places. Stargazer's war-protester father calls her dad a "baby killer" for his role in Vietnam, but the dogtags, with the serial number and blood type of someone named James who was killed by the Vietnamese, still seems to haunt him. Who was this man and what secrets were hidden away in that box? Tracy has to know what they can tell her about the other part of her, that half that was named Tuyet and once lived by a tea-colored river.

Elizabeth Partridge's moving novel, Dogtag Summer (Bloomsbury, 2011) , set in 1980 in the aftermath of that war, testifies to the truth that in a way wars are never over. Suffering from what we now call PTSD, her dad is still fighting a war within over what he did and saw in that war, and Tracy realizes that she, too, carries within herself the contradictions of that war, that the story of that mysterious James and her Vietnamese mother is her story as well., and that she was and is loved by both families, the living and the dead.

Partridge skillfully weaves the flashbacks of her former life with the daily events of Tracy's summer as she makes her separate peace with the ghosts of the past and the spirits of the living. A deeply meaningful book which deserves more acclaim than it has received, Dogtag Summer pairs well with the current National Book Award and Newbery Honor-winning Inside Out and Back Again as poignant and telling records for young adult readers of this period in our history, both as historical novel studies or for an understanding of that war for thoughtful readers.