On the Other Side: The Zebra Forest by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

Here are my three real wishes:

1. Get tall.
2. Have an adventure.
3. Meet my father.

It is the last day before summer vacation in Mrs. Roberts' sixth grade class, and Annie is ready with three fake wishes for the predictable essay "Three Wishes I'd Like to Fulfill over Summer Vacation." Gran has always said that if you were going to lie, be a good liar, and Annie's essay has three plausible wishes that she knows are all lies that aren't going to happen.

And Annie knows her real wishes aren't going to happen either. She's short like Gran, the tiny town of Sunshine is perennially short of adventures, and as for her third wish...

"...that was the unlikeliest wish of all.  Because even if I drank a magic elixir and sprouted a few feet, and even if angry revolutionaries suddenly stormed the streets of boring old Sunshine, wish number three was impossible.  I could never meet my father.  My father was dead."

But in Adina Rishe Giwirtz's debut novel, Zebra Forest (Candlewick, 2013), all three wishes are granted in a way Annie could never have predicted.

Ever since her mother dumped Annie and her younger brother Rew off with Gran, saying simply, "they were his idea, not mine," Gran has told them that their father is dead, killed by an anonymous "evil man" in a fight, and the house on the edge of the zebra forest, a woods of white birches and black oaks, has been their whole world. Gran is loving but unpredictable and depressive, and her days of withdrawal to her room have become more and more frequent.  Annie has learned how to do the shopping, pick up mail from their box at the post office,  pay the bills, and be a good liar whenever people inquired about Gran's health.  There are plenty of  her father's old books to read, especially their favorite Treasure Island, and  Rew loves the adventure stories that Annie makes up about their father as a famous spy, a pirate, always a hero.

But then a prisoner revolt and mass escape at the nearby state penitentiary makes Sunshine the top item on national news, and Annie's summer adventure begins when an escapee breaks into their house and holds them hostage, threatening her and forcing Annie to lie convincingly to the police who search the countryside around the prison. As several weeks pass, Annie begins to suspect that their captor knows more about her family than seems possible, and finally she guesses that he is her father, her father who was not the victim but indeed the killer in that struggle.

And gradually, as Annie comes to know him, he begins to seem less like an evil man and more like a man who could have been, and is, their father.  Rew still plots escape, but Annie finds herself somehow drawn to Andrew Stone and calculating to prevent their father's discovery, understanding more and more about her family's strange history as the summer passes.

While Annie grows little in the physical sense that summer, she does grow and mature emotionally in this new coming-of-age novel. Like the zebra forest which changes with the seasons, the birches shedding their white bark and the oaks greening over, Annie comes to see that things are not so black and white as the younger Rew sees them.  Giwirtz's debut is impressive, with a slow but suspenseful exposition, part mystery, part suspense story, part character-driven novel that becomes increasingly compelling as layers of family history are peeled away like birchbark and a new family story, one without lies, emerges.

Above us the bare branches crisscrossed the sky, the white ones nearly disappearing against the clouds. I thought how much I liked winter in the Zebra when you could see the intricate pattern of those branches. 

But then, I like all the seasons, and I like that they'll come round next year, too.

It's nice to know, though, that some things really do change.

Kirkus Reviews says, "Gewirtz's emotionally intense debut novel about the complications of families offers a perceptive heroine and poetic, impressive prose."

Down to Earth: Grounded by Kate Klise

I knew I should've cried, but I couldn't. I didn't feel sad. That's the other thing about funerals: sometimes you don't feel sad. You don't feel anything at all other than a sense of floating above yourself, and looking down on the scene, thinking: That's not really me; that's not really them.

Daralynn knows she should be dead, would've been dead, if her mom had not grounded her for fishing at Doc Lake without permission. Her pilot dad, big brother, and little sister went off for a fun flight around the countryside while she sulked on the porch, and they all died in an meaningless crash.

Now there's just Daralyn, her angry, dry-eyed mother, and her increasingly senile grandmother Mamaw, who adopts and cares for all the dolls kindly neighbors gave Dara after the funeral, the care that her mother is now incapable of offering her.

I began to think of my life as a time line. Before the Crash was B.C.. After the Deaths was A.D.

In my B.C. life my mother didn't have a job. Now in the A.D. era, Mother was going to be a hair stylist for dead people.

For most of my life B.C., I'd been part of a family of five. Now we were a family of two--Mother and me, plus Mamaw next door.

In the tiny town of Digginsville, Missouri, population 402, there aren't many jobs for a young widow, and although taking a job styling client's hair for the local undertaker seems a strange job for the recently bereaved, in her matter-of-fact way Daralyn accepts her mom's new job and even goes along to learn the hairdressing trade, setting up her own styling chair for the kids in town and inadvertently creating "La Frenchie," a local haircut sensation. when she mistakes a little girl for a boy and gives her a Marlon Brando do.

Despite her mother's disapproval, Daralynn finds support from her flamboyant Aunt Josie, and things are beginning to look up in Digginsville. Dara is even heartened when she learns that what she takes to be a fancy ice-cream parlor is soon to open there Then she discovers to her mortification that a crematorium is not a sweet shop, but major competition for her mother's employer. To make matters even more complicated, the proposed proprietor of Clem's Crematorium turns out to be a devastatingly handsome fast talker who sweet-talks Aunt Josie out of her nest egg as backing and sweeps her off her feet with a proposal of marriage.

But Daralynn, a girl with both feet on the ground, intuits that there's something underhanded about Clem and throws all her eleven-year-old detective skills into sleuthing out the truth behind the new venture. What she discovers sets even the sensible Dara back on her heels, and when she learns that the much-touted cremation equipment which Josie paid for has never been delivered to Clem's enterprise, she realizes that she has to find out what the shyster is actually doing with those bodies he's being paid to cremate.

In a midnight confrontation at Doc Lake, Dara nails the murderous malefactor and proves herself a worthy heroine in Kate Klise's latest novel, appropriately titled Grounded (Feiwel & Friends, 2010). Klise is known for her quirky, yet poignant characters, and the aptly named Digginsville denizens are no exception, as salty as tears and as grounded in the realities of life as a cemetery marker. Klise brings her characters to a realization of the beauty of living life and valuing each other while they can in a story that is both an absorbing mystery adventure and a lesson for the soul.

Happy Endings: Way Down Deep by Ruth White

Ruth White, Newbery winner (for Belle Prater's Boy, 1996), has given us another "realistic fantasy" novel, Way Down Deep, set in mid-twentieth century Appalachia. Like a charming snow globe village, the quaint little town of Way Down, West Virginia, sits snugly in its own little sphere, a deep valley in the mountains, an almost self-contained world with wonderful quirky charcters--crotchety oldsters, a goat who loves the view from car tops, genial tradespeople, a reclusive spinster boardinghouse owner, and a mysterious orphan who appears one morning in 1944, proclaiming her name is "Woo-bee" and that she came to town by means of a "wide" on a "hossie."

Little "Ruby" is instantly taken in by Miss Arbutus Ward, sole survivor of Way Down's first family and proprietor of The Roost, Way Down's boardinghouse which for three generations has sheltered the town's unmarried and misfit citizens, along with occasional traveling salesmen. Given the surname "June" for the month of her sudden appearance on the town square, Ruby June and her little Radio Flyer wagon are a frequent and welcome sight about town as she helps Miss Arbutus with tasks around The Roost and runs errands for its colorful residents. Doted upon by the town residents, by her twelfth summer life for Ruby June seems nearly perfect as she looks forward to a joyful summer topped off by the annual Kids' Day carnival in August.

In the peaceful summer of 1954 author White gives this idyllic village snow globe vignette a vigorous shake, in the personage of Bob Reeder, a reluctant robber who, armed with a plastic toy gun, desperately tries to hold up the Way Down Bank. "You don't want to do this, do you?" suggests a sympathetic bank customer. "Robber Bob," as he is immediately named, confesses that he's "riding the crest of a slump," having lost his wife and job, with a bunch of homeless kids to care for. Way Down takes in the tearful little man, finding him a vacant house to move into and a job at the local grocery. When Ruby June meets up with Robber Bob's elder sons, Peter and Cedar Reeder and his elderly and senile father Bird, forces are set in motion which change everything for Ruby and give Way Down something to talk about for several generations yet to come.

It all starts when old Bird Reeder keeps telling everyone that Ruby is a missing child whom everyone in Yonder Mountain, Virginia, believed to have been eaten by a panther:

"Panther got 'er," Bird mumbled.

"Don't pay any attention to Bird," Peter said. "He rambles a lot. Has no idea what he's talking about."

"He's talking about panthers," Ruby said.

"That's right!" Bird said loudly. "There were panthers on the mountain."

"It's okay, Bird," Peter said. "There are no panthers here."

"Panthers ate her all up," Bird cried out, pulling at his silver hair in agitation.

Peter comforted the old man by patting him on the back. "Who, Bird? Who did the panthers eat up?"

"Her!" Bird hollered again, pointing at Ruby.

From Robber Bob's piecemeal memory, Ruby finds out that she indeed appeared in Way Down the morning after the red-haired toddler, surprisingly named Ruby Jolene Hurley, disappeared from a family on Yonder Mountain headed up by the Widow Combs. Suddenly Ruby understands that she indeed has a family, still living on Yonder Mountain and knows that she has to go there to meet her grandmother and cousins and find out who she really is and how she came to be set down in Way Down on that June morning.

Author Ruth White shakes up Ruby's view of who she is and in turn shakes up the lives of Miss Arbutus and of Ruby's withdrawn and loveless grandmother on the mountain. While she shows the events of Ruby's sudden appearance in Way Down through a glass darkly, the truth of family and the human needs for love and redemption shine brightly through this fable-like narrative. Reviewer Ilene Cooper of Booklist calls this mystery novel of magical realism "as tender as a breeze and as sharp as a tack." Just as the swirling snow settles down inside the globe to reveal a scene both the same and different, Ruby (and the book's readers) become part of a vast change in the characters' internal landscapes. Middle readers, just beginning to work out their own identities, will be drawn to and learn from Ruby's search for her real self and the truth behind her own personal story.