Enchanted Ivy

October 4, 2010
In this variation on the magic child goes to school theme, 16-year-old Lily Carter accompanies her grandfather and dim, frail mother to Princeton for Reunions weekend. At the Vineyard Club, an exclusive undergraduate "eating club" (modeled on actual Princeton institutions), Lily meets her grandfather's former classmates and is invited to undergo the Legacy Test: if she can find the Ivy Key, she will automatically be admitted to Princeton. Amid crowds of good-natured strangers clad in orange and black, Lily does not at first question the help she gets from a boy with tiger-striped hair. But when stone gargoyles move and books in the library attack, Lily stops taking her assumptions about reality for granted. College admission seems an odd choice for Durst's (Ice) YA fantasy premise; teens generally look upon college as an opportunity for real life to get better, not an event requiring imaginative escape. Readers for whom the admissions process is not an imminent issue may be more intrigued. Lily's naïve perceptions and the book's simple moral framework also point to a younger audience for this bit of nostalgic whimsy. Ages 12–up.

December 1, 2010

Gr 8 Up-Applying to one's dream school is a stressful process, especially if the school is Princeton, as it is for 16-year-old Lily Carter. But Lily's grandfather, an alumnus, has arranged a possible in for her: the Legacy Test. If she can pass the test by finding the Ivy Key, the exclusive Vineyard Club will guarantee her admission. The test turns out to be a means of introducing Lily to the "other" Princeton; a twin university in a parallel world inhabited by magical creatures. Tensions between the two worlds are strained, and the revelation of the Key soon brings the conflict to a head and forces Lily to confront some startling discoveries about herself, her mentally unbalanced mother, and the father who died when she was just a baby. While the story and the depiction of the magical world are fairly basic, Durst clearly enjoys spinning her supernatural ideas out of the architecture and lore of Princeton. Lily deals with the peculiarity of her situation in a believable manner, and her two potential love interests-a loner boy with orange-and-black hair and the handsome grandson of the Vineyard Club president-are charming. Fans of Lesley Livingston's "Wondrous Strange" series (HarperCollins) may find this similar melding of the mundane and the magical appealing.-Christi Esterle, Parker Library, CO

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