Shoddy Cove

June 1, 2003
Gr 5-8-Clare, 12, is spending the summer at Maine's Cossit Island Village, a living-history museum. During a reenactment of an early-19th-century funeral, she discovers two runaway children, May and Adam, who are hiding at the museum. A confessional letter the boy finds in an 1835 Farmer's Almanack addresses the supposed drownings of an African-American mother and her son, and Adam uncovers some clues to the true history of Cossit Island as a safe stop on the Underground Railroad. Clare faces two mysteries to solve, one in the past and one in the present. The two stories have many parallels: Adam is afraid that he'll be separated from his half sister, just as the slave families were separated, for example. This ambitious undertaking is marred by a disorienting number of plot elements and confusing characters, the importance of some of whom, such as a mean woman with a sour smell, seems to diminish over the course of the novel. The fog that frequently surrounds the island lends a supernatural air to the story that is strengthened by the confusing sense Clare sometimes has that she has gone back in time. Occasionally, the story itself seems as foggy as the weather on the island.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME

Copyright 2003 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2003
Gr. 5-7. Levin weaves past, present, and a hint of the supernatural into this multithreaded tale of runaway children in different centuries. Clare chafes at being an unpaid, costumed "resident" at the reconstructed nineteenth-century settlement (where her mother works), until she meets Adam and May, half-sibs hiding out from relatives who would separate them. After Adam reluctantly enlists Clare's help in making contact with a possible rescuer, he reveals an old letter proving that the shelter where he and his half-sister are hiding once harbored fugitive slaves. Along with picturing day-to-day life in a busy tourist attraction, Levin fills in historical background about the Underground Railroad's early days and unravels a mystery from the 1830s involving the death of a slave hunter. To the modern plot with a startling twist at the end, she also adds several unexplained incidents, including encounters with eerily elusive, possibly ghostly strangers. It's all a bit of a jumble, but the themes and setting will intrigue young readers, and Clare, whose mother is an adoptee of Vietnamese-African American descent, has a refreshingly strong presence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)