It's the late 1800s in America, and the white people in power are trying to civilize the Indians -- and one way they're doing it is to forcibly remove as many Indian children as they can and send them to boarding schools far away from their homes.

Sun Song and Otter are members of an unnamed desert tribe who fall foul of this policy while in their teens. Sun Song is a storyteller, Otter is a silversmith, and the pair are very much in love. But at the white man's school, they are forced apart, given new names and new clothing, and told not to speak their mother tongue upon threat of punishment.

Otter adapts to his new name, Gideon, and his new life, but Sun Song can't do it. She ends up brutalized by the school's headmaster, and cannot bring herself to tell Gideon what's going on. In the meantime, Gideon has begun to fall for the daughter of a white patron of the school. But the spirits of the land have not deserted them, and Gideon and Sun Song discover they have a role to play in saving the earth for all people.

Zeidel's writing is smooth; her characters are appealing and finely drawn. I was interested in the subject matter anyway, of course, but I was delighted to find the story was so well told. I highly recommend this novel -- and if you enjoy it, too, then you should also look for Zeidel's short stories about this pair: The Boy Who Survived the River and Why Hummingbird is So Small.

Molly and Kip are two siblings who escape the Great Famine in Ireland only to find themselves orphaned and penniless. Kip doesn't know the full truth – in order to protect him, Molly told him that they'd simply gotten separated and their parents would come for them soon. In the meantime, they need money and/or a place to live, so Molly lies about her age and gets hired as the Windsor family's new maid.

The Windsor family home is creepy and strange. It and the enormous tree next to it have nearly become one. Branches have grown through the walls, and the Windsors forbid Molly and Kip to do anything about it. Molly has to clean up mysterious muddy boot prints throughout the house every day, and Kip swears that he saw someone moving around outside at night. Then there's the locked room with the green door, the one room in the house Molly isn't allowed to enter.

I was disappointed when page 4 of this middle grade book had a shepherd “eyeing Molly from heel to head the way that men sometimes did.” It seems like every scary/creepy story starring a girl has someone leering at the girl to emphasize her vulnerability, and I'm tired of it. Molly was fourteen, penniless, parentless, and her sickly brother's only guardian – you'd think that would have been more than enough to show how desperate her situation was. Thankfully, there were only two instances of leering in this book, and Mr. Windsor wasn't one of the men who did it.

Okay, moving on. This started off nice and creepy. I enjoyed the house with roots and branches growing all throughout it, and Molly and Kip's discovery of the Night Gardener and his activities. I wanted to see if everyone would manage to break free of the hold the house had on them, and whether the Night Gardener would let them.

I do think that this book stopped short of actually being scary, at least for me (I can't speak for its intended audience). After a certain point, the “scary stuff” was pretty out in the open, and I tend to be more affected by psychological horror. By the end of the book, Molly and Kip knew what was keeping everyone at the house, what the Night Gardener was doing, and the rules the Night Gardener had to follow.

The ending seemed a little too easy. Molly had spent most of the book lying almost every time she opened her mouth and couldn't seem to stop even when she knew that others were aware of what she was doing. The Windsors had been completely sucked in by the things the house was doing for them. All it took was a couple big action scenes to make everything better. I think I'd have been more on board with this if all the characters' problems had been supernatural, but they weren't. I suspect younger readers would be happier and more satisfied with how things turn out for Molly, Kip, and the Windsors than I was.

Overall, this was an okay read. I wish it had been as creepy by the end as it was in the beginning, but at least I stayed interested throughout the whole thing.  

 

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

As always, please keep in mind that all reviews here are my sole personal opinion. I don’t deconstruct a book in an university essay way – I simply talk about how much or how little I enjoyed a book and if it “spoke” to me or sucked me in. What I think of a book may not be what you – or even all the critics in the world – thought of it.

Right, now I’ve got that out of the way. Read this in about an hour and a half. Yep, it’s that short. I spent more time reading the interview with S. E. Hinton in the second half of the book, than the I did the first, which are the actual stories.

This book made me think. And not in a deep philosophical way. It made me think in a cynical way. About the idea behind publishing this book. And not in a good way.

Fourteen very very short stories that are interconnected – they tell the story of two cousins, Terry & Mike, who are very close. The deaths of their fathers when they are children dictate the rest of their lives. Terry takes the wrong fork and is in prison. Mike takes the wrong fork too, but he spends his life feeling copious amounts of grief and guilt that he’s not in prison with Terry. The last tale ends abruptly, on a cliffhanger, and you have no idea what happens.

It wasn’t till I looked the book up online that I found out who the “Tim” in the title is. The idea is that these stories are written by Tim, who is actually Mike.

*blinks*

Uh, ok? Tim is never mentioned in the stories. Tim is never alluded to, his presence is never sensed. So…what the hell point is he? I have no idea. Why not have the character called “Tim”? Why not call it “Some of Mike’s Stories”? What on earth was the point of supposedly writing it as “Tim” and changing the character’s name to Mike?

The stories are…nice. Yeah. But Mike and Terry stay frustratingly out of reach of the reader. There is too little of them to connect to me. And the last story, the one that is so abruptly cut short. Does Mike live? Does Mike die? Does the climatic event teach him a life lesson? Does it make everything that went before ok? Is his life of guilt validated by what happens? Huh?

The reason I’m so cynical about this book is that it strikes me as something that was published simply because it’s S. E. Hinton. The whole book feels like exercises written in a college Creative Writing course. And then they were gathered together cos OMG SE HINTON IS BACK. And then throw in the huge interviews at the back to pad out the book. And the “Tim” thing? It smacks of conceit. And it doesn’t make sense. They’re writing exercises, to get to know a character in a longer book, or to demonstrate you have a grasp of writing fiction. They’re character pieces. Not worthy of a published book.

I feel cheated. I feel I was led to believe I was going to get a full book, a full story that would build on the magic of The Outsiders or Rumble Fish or Tex. Not a series of exercises that a writer may do to help build a new novel, a new world.

I believe this is being published in ebook form for the first time, as the paperback was released in 2009. If you’re a fan of The Outsiders, the only value this book has is the lengthy interview pieces at the end. Which were done in 2006, so they are already old news.

I don’t particularly want to rate this book. The interviews would get 2 stars maybe simply for the information – old as it is – in it. The stories themselves would maybe get 2 stars. The entire thing? Probably a -1.

And now you know why I prefaced this review with that intro.

Disappointed.

Outstanding anthology!