From School Library Journal
ê Grade 6-9-Cornelia Thornhill wears neglect like a pall. She avoids eye contact with others, stutters badly, is presumed to be slow at school, and likens herself to a stone, hard and strong way down inside. Taken out of school during ninth grade by her shiftless mother, she is dropped off at the rural New England home of Great-aunt Agatha while mother and her boyfriend depart for places out west. This lonely, virtually invisible girl both misses and resents her absent parent. The short, image-rich, first-person chapters echo Cornelia's anger and stubbornness as she describes her new living situation with the folksy, forthright Agatha. They argue, stop talking, and Cornelia even packs her bag to run away. What brings these unlikely companions back together is their grudging interdependence and Cornelia's recognition that nature-loving Agatha, locally dubbed the Crow Lady, has been as misunderstood as she. Cornelia begins to see her aunt's kindness through the eyes of Bo, a local girl whose nonjudgmental friendship helps Cornelia to grow. Subtle clues indicate that Agatha has been good at hiding the fact that she's illiterate, much as Cornelia has hidden the fact that she is a voracious reader. Agatha allows her niece to teach her to read using a butterfly handbook as a primer. The depiction of Bo's father as a fearsome, controlling man is the only false note in a novel that poetically portrays the human potential to fly after emerging from a cocoon of neglect.
Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT
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