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Barillaro, Alan

Where the Water Takes Us

208 pp. | Candlewick | July, 2023 | Trade ISBN 9781536224542 $18.99
(2) 4-6 Because her mother is in the late stages of a high-risk pregnancy, Ava has been sent to stay with her grandparents at their cabin on a lake. In her state of worry, Ava persuades herself that the fates of her mother and her about-to-be-born twin brothers depend on various secret bargains that she makes and on rituals she performs, including the successful rearing of two baby robins. An initially annoying neighbor kid provides ballast to her adventures. Barillaro convincingly captures the kind of magical thinking that results from deep distress and lodges his story firmly in an eleven-year-old's consciousness. For example, Ava saves a woodpecker's feather as a talisman: "Maybe keeping it made her weird, but maybe she had always been weird and didn't know it until right then." The writing is clear, unpretentious, and particularly rich in details about boating, fashioning homemade noodles, digging for worms, performing life-saving techniques during a water emergency, how to cope with a power outage, and confusion about whether administering CPR counts as kissing (i.e., heroic or ick?). Delicate watercolor decorations on each page enhance the gentle, slightly otherworldly feel of the text. A fine, original example of the "summer at the cottage" middle-grade novel trope.
Reviewer: Sarah Ellis | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2023

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