Janet Taylor Lisle

In her ragged clothes and oversized boots, Sarah-Kate is a figure of ridicule at school. However, she has a magic elf village in her neglected back yard, as Hillary discovers one day when Sarah-Kate invites her over to see it. The two girls spend the fall "helping" the elves by making tiny improvements to their village, and Hillary hopes, more than anything, to see an elf for herself, if she is careful and quiet and looks deeply at the natural world as Sarah-Kate instructs. Sarah-Kate can be show more strange and temperamental, but Hillary is completely taken with this new friendship . . . until the day Sarah-Kate disappears.

There are hints of magic to this story, which is what I think I gravitated toward when I read this as a child (I'm pretty certain I read this as a child?), but as an adult it's a darkly bittersweet book about child neglect and a family in need to help. It feels a tiny bit dated now, but there's still the lovely allure of the elf village and the compelling character of Sarah-Kate to give the story its appeal. show less

Olivia is desperate and miserable. Her mother died during the winter and there's no one but her to look after and understand five-year-old Nellie. Especially now that Pop is sending them to stay with Aunt Minty. She's old and doesn't really want them - and she certainly doesn't understand Nellie's Rules, which must be followed.

Aunt Minty makes some well-intentioned but disastrous attempts to help Olivia and Nellie, but their healing doesn't really begin until Olivia finds an old book and show more they set out on a marvelous treasure hunt. Could the magical story of the Lost Flower Children be true? Nellie absolutely believes, but Olivia knows she's too old for magic. But maybe a little magic is just what she needs.

This story doesn't have the wrenching emotional pain of some of the contemporary middle grade books about death, such as Suzanne LaFleur's Love, Aubrey or Sally Nicholls' Ways to Live Forever, but Olivia and Nellie's grief and struggle to adjust after their mother's death is very real. Their characters are beautifully drawn and open to the reader throughout the story as we watch them grow, change, and create a new family dynamic. Like the garden, Olivia and Nellie come back to life slowly. It takes a lot of work and weeding from everyone, but the result is beautiful.

Verdict: I've read several Janet Taylor Lisle novels and found them compelling, although not what I'd normally read. I picked this one up because the cover and interior illustrations are done by Satomi Ichikawa, whom I love for her illustrations of Patricia Lee Gauch's Tanya ballet picture books. I also love anything Ichikawa does involving gardens, so this was a lovely book. Worth adding to your library, even as a paperback.

ISBN:978-0698118805; Published April 2001 (out of print); Received through Bookmooch. show less

Olivia and her complicated little sister Nellie have lost their mother, and their salesman father has to leave them with their Great Aunt Minty while he travels. 5 year old Nellie is coping with the loss by hedging herself around with rules and obsessive behaviours, which Olivia has to safeguard and explain. Frail old Minty gives them the run of her overgrown garden and overloaded bookshelves, but otherwise stands back.
When Minty digs up a tiny blue teacup, and Olivia finds a story of show more children under enchantment in a garden like their own - a story written by a former owner of the house - Nellie sets out to find all the buried cups, and free the children trapped as flowers.

Overall, this was quite good. Lisle does a good job, within a short book, of portraying children suffering loss in different ways. As an adult reader, I could see the ending coming, but it didn't feel wrenched into shape. If I'd read this as a child, I would have loved it for the setting (overgrown garden, house full of books, eccentric old lady) though I might have been disappointed that the magic wasn't overt. show less

Sara-Kate is a fifth grader who stayed behind a year and everyone knows she's bad news. But one day, she invites fourth-grader Hillary over to see a village built by elves. Hillary's yard, with its carefully tended garden, backs up to Sara-Kate's, which is a mess of weeds and poison ivy, and Hillary is intrigued by the possibility of elves. Though her parents aren't so sure about it, Hillary and Sara-Kate strike up an unlikely friendship and begin to play together in the yard.

This was an odd show more sort of story that I think perhaps did not work well for me both on audio and as an adult. It left a tension of whether or not the elves were real or just Sara-Kate's imagination (or, perhaps more insidiously, a lie to get Hillary to play with her). Her father is "away on a trip" and her mother doesn't leave the house, which may have seemed like delicious freedom to a child reader and immediately sends up red flags to an adult. The ending is ambiguous in a few ways, both leaving open the possibility of magic and never really resolving Sara-Kate's problems. I think as a result, I would've believed in the magic as a child but I'm left rather unsettled instead. show less