This is a touching book by one of my favorite childhood authors. Some young girls will be able to relate to the main character, who is painfully shy, full of doubts, and more comfortable with adults than her peers. It’s a coming of age story in which growing up means relating to people one’s own age. ( )

Richie's Picks: A CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE by Ann Martin, Scholastic Press,
October 2002

"Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Jai Guru Deva Om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world..."--Lennon/McCartney

"I look for the films from this summer. Dad has spliced them together onto a
big reel labeled JUNE--JULY 1960. I hold it in my hands, turn it over and
over."

Ho, ho! Ann Martin. I also grew up with a bunch of old home movies.
Luckily, back in the mid-90's, my parents brought the reels someplace where
they were all copied onto VHS tapes and duplicated for me 'n the sibs.

But I remember back in the 60's when we'd periodically sit around watching
them with the Jiffy-Pop popcorn and the movie screen and that little
projector that'd get hot enough to cook on. I also knew about running the
movies backward and forward. My favorite film involved the family and my
grandfather Rex out back at our little Doughboy-style pool. I guess I was
eight. There I was, climbing up the little ladder, perching at the top with
my thumbs linked, and then diving in with a big splash. If I stopped the
projector and reversed it, I would do a reverse dive, feet-first back out
onto the ladder with the accompanying big, silent reverse-splash.

"...And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
And there but for fortune, may go you or I..."--Phil Ochs

Ann Martin has written a courageous tale involving mental illness. A CORNER
OF THE UNIVERSE, like her last book BELLE TEAL, is set in the early 1960s and
is told in a quiet, straightforward narrative style by a preteen main
character. Hattie Owen is a shy eleven-year-old living in her parents'
small-town boarding house. Her strong-willed and extremely proper
grandmother lives nearby. Hattie's sheltered world is shaken up when
twenty-one year old Uncle Adam, about whom she's never been told, arrives
with the beginning of the summer. The long-term care facility where he had
been living has closed.

"After lunch Adam and I sit on the porch, and now he's serious and
thoughtful. Adam's moods are like a deck of playing cards with someone
riffling through them--dozens of cards, one after the other, in a blur.
'The whole world passes by your house, Hattie,' Adam says after a moment.
He's looking toward Grant Avenue.
'I know. That's why sometimes I hate our porch.' When Adam looks at me
sharply, I hasten to add, 'I mean, I don't really hate our porch--'
'You can hate your porch,' says Adam.
'Good. Because sometimes I do.'
Adam is just looking at me, waiting.
'Some days,' I say, 'I feel like I don't belong anywhere in that world. That
world out there.' I point to Grant. 'People walk down our street and people
drive down it and people ride their bicycles down it and all of them, even
the ones I know, could be from another planet. And I'm a visiting alien.'
'And aliens don't belong anywhere,' Adam finishes for me, 'except in their
own little corners of the universe.'
'Right,' I say."

A potential challenge of selling A CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE will be to find
parents, teachers, and librarians who don't freak out about recommending the
book to children close to the age of the main character despite Adam's noted
propensity for staring at the bosom of a twentysomething resident of the
boarding house.

Ann Martin has written a story with a lot of heart, a story about another
face of tolerance, and I hope preteen kids do get the opportunity to read it.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy at aol.com ( )

A young girl learns that she has an uncle who is mentially challenged who comes to lives with the grandmother. She befriends him over the summer at the same time she meets a girl who is part of the summer county fair. She goes to the fair everyday. One day, unbeknownst to the family, she takes her uncle to the fair and encourages him to go on the ferris wheel. He says no, but then OK. He gets up top when it breaks down and he freaks out and tries to climb out of the their seat. Police come and he is taken away. He later commits suicide. ( )

a new favorite. add this to my 'coming of age' novels that I seem to enjoy so much. ( )

A Corner of The Universe by Ann Martin is a great book that is defiantly one of my favorites. I read this a few years ago and I have been planning on reading it again. It is a story about a young girl and her mentaly retarded Uncle that she was unaware of untill his school was closing and he had to move back home with his family. This book tells the story of 12 year old Hattie's summer dealing and loving her newly found Uncle. ( )