In a Mist: The Clearing by Heather Davis

"What's going on here?" Amy crossed her arms over her chest and glanced back at the farmhouse, at the shiny truck in the driveway. "That's a new truck, isn't it? That's not a classic."

"Yes."

"And the apple tree--and the summer days..." Amy's eyes clouded with emotion.

"Well--" Henry began.

"You're not from here," she murmured.

"Yes, I am."

"No. No. It can't be. This isn't possible." Amy backed away from him, backed all the way through the empty field, watching him while she vanished into the mist like a ghost.

Fleeing an abusive boyfriend, Amy moves in with her great-aunt Mae, sharing the small trailer and beginning her junior year at the small rural high school far from home. Mae, who never married after her fiance Joe died at Iwo Jima, gives Amy the space to find her way, and a kind local boy, Jackson, tries to draw her into school activities, but Amy is a girl hoping to leave her past life behind but having no hopes for the new one before her.

Then, chasing Aunt Mae's dog in the nearby fields, Amy's curiosity is drawn to a deep mist in the woods at the edge of the field, and pushing through the strangely deep fog, she finds a clearing where she meets a boy resting in the shade beside an old rotary push mower. A compelling friendship soon develops between the two and they begin to meet in their place often.

But Henry is a boy, the only one in his family, who realizes that they are living in a cocoon of suspended time, in a life with a past but with no future, only a recurring and inescapable present.

Gradually the situation unfolds to both of them. Henry sees that the time loop began when his mother received a telegram from the War Department, notifying her that his brother Robert was missing in action in the war in the Pacific. Fearing for his mother's sanity and health, that night Henry prays that the feared future, with the news of Robert's death, will not come and finds himself in a world in which it is always early June of 1944. Days are always sunny and warm and the new apples never ripen there, but soon, as Henry and Amy fall deeply in love with each other, they realize they are from two different times, and together they must find different futures in which Henry can live out his family's and his own future in his time.

Although Heather Davis' The Clearing (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), shares a supernatural element with the current run of teen vampire and werewolf romances, the similarity ends there. A novel romance of great sweetness and poignancy, this one successfully builds parallel worlds, both of which seem as real as the young lovers who try to move between them. Avoiding an easy ending in which the two discover a way to be together through time, author Davis yet finds a believable way for Henry to change Amy's own life for the better in a final proof of his love, an ending in which true romantics will be satisfied and the novel's theme of timeless love remains uncompromised.

Friendship! Just the Perfect Blendship! Little Beauty by Anthony Browne

Once upon a time there was a very special gorilla. He had been taught sign language.

If there was anything he wanted, he could ask his keepers for it with his hands. It seemed that he had everything he needed.

But the gorilla was sad.

"I want a friend," he signed.

Many of Anthony Browne's picture books are noted for their magical realism, and in his Little Beauty (Candlewick Press, 2008), he borrows from both the well-known nonfiction picture book Koko's Kitten, (Reading Rainbow Book) the true story of a signing gorilla who bonds deeply with a real pet kitten, and the classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, with added touches of his own sly humor and accomplished illustrative style.

Gorilla seems to have it all: a big-screen TV, burgers and beverages on demand, and a posh apartment, but when he poignantly signs to his keepers that he is lonely, he gets what he really wants--a beautiful kitten who becomes his boon companion. "Don't eat her!" the keepers admonish, and Gorilla is indeed gentle and loving to his dainty little friend, naming her "Beauty."

The two do everything together, including toileting, shown in one delightfully funny double-page spread, as the two use their respective facilities as a duet, Gorilla on his porcelain potty, Beauty on her tidy litter box. All goes well until Gorilla, reacting to the movie King Kong, which he obviously finds distastefully politically incorrect, angrily smashes the television set. The horrified keepers rush in and, fearing for her safety, try to remove Little Beauty from the apparent danger of a rampaging gorilla.

"Who broke the television?" the dismayed keepers inquired.

"It...was...ME! I broke the television!" signed Beauty.

The combination of the improbability and self-sacrifice of this confession finally melt the outrage of the keepers, and Gorilla and Little Beauty, we presume, live happily together ever after.

Anthony Browne, whose picture book style harks decades back to the still popular Piggybook (which Booklist appropriately described as "a wickedly feminist tale"), here marries marvelously spare but witty text with exquisite pencil and watercolor illustrations, beautifully tactile and humorously detailed, which can't help but charm young readers. As he often does to engage his fans, Browne shrewdly hides images inside images, and he offers just a touch of this technique in the rose which suggest the "Beauty" of the fairy tale and which hides the face of a gorilla within its central petals.

Little Beauty (Candlewick Press, 2008) is, on one level, a simple story of loyal friendship, but one which contains within its art layers of meaning which deepen the story with a touch of fairy tale enchantment.