From Booklist, August 2004

ê Grade 7-10 Like Katherine Paterson's classic The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978) and many other stories of the rejected kid who finds a family with a rough solitary older adult, this quiet, beautiful first novel makes the search for home a searing drama. Cornelia, 14, is dumped by her mother and stuck with elderly Great-aunt Agatha in a backwoods cottage thick with dust, cobwebs, and dirty dishes.  There's not even a toilet.  An unusual twist on the theme is that Cornelia arrives with a crate of books, including Oliver Twist and Tom Sawyer.  She knows she's "a bookworm, a bibliophile," and, yes, she finds metaphor in ordinary things.  But no one knows how smart she is, because she's ashamed of her stammering and barely speaks.  With poetic simplicity, her desperate first-person, present-tense narrative, rooted in the physical facts of her life, reveals how she feels " caught in that lonely place between what I want to say and what I can't."  She and Agatha slam doors and scream; they discover secrets and hurt each other deeply.  But Cornelia's speech improves, and she no longer looks away when she talks.  Readers may guess the secrets and the ending is predictable, but there's wonderful drama in the relationship, and mixed with all the sorrow is helpless laughter.  -Hazel Rochman.