Reviews

Sturdy, earth-bound Flora resents her glamorous cousin. Newly orphaned Anthea has come to live with Flora's family in the house that is haunted by the girls' grandfather, Lionel. Unsure of her place in this chaotic adoptive family, Anthea retreats to Viridian, a strange dream landscape that was created and is inhabited by ghostly Lionel's long-dead younger brother. At first Viridian is a haven for Anthea, and seems more real than her waking life. But later, as her involvement with her new family grows, Anthea's nightly journeys become sinister and even life-threatening. It is fierce and noisy Flora who charges into Viridian, rescues her cousin and puts the family's stray ghosts to rest, at last. Readers with the tenacity to get past the initial tedious and disorienting descriptions of Viridian will find plenty of food for thought in the novel's closing scenes. The last third of the book is filled with the sort of writing Mahy's fans have come to expect: breathtaking adventure combined with honest and memorable insights into the workings of a family. Though it never achieves the seamless merging of magic and drama that characterize The Changeover and The Haunting , this novel will linger in the mind of the reader. Ages 10-14. (Apr.)

Gr 5-8-- Anthea, thrust into the tumultuous bosom of her uncle's family by her parents' untimely deaths, finds herself crowded physically and spiritually by their noisy, messy togetherness (which includes her grandfather's ghost). In her grief and discomfort, Anthea is ripe for the grand spaciousness of Viridian, a land created by a long-dead great-uncle also in need of large personal spaces. His spirit is still there, desperate for companionship to continue his ``journey beyond.'' Anthea, willing at first, finds the seductive spaces of Viridian intruding on her waking life even as she begins to find her own place in her new family. Her cousin Flora, plump and freckled, at first resents slim and elegant Anthea, but as she too discovers Viridian, she also discovers a fondness for her cousin, and worries that she will be lost. Flora, always a life-force, faces her grandfather's ghost at last, forces his spirit to relinquish its grip on the family home and go to the aid of his brother, and she literally rides to Anthea's rescue in an exciting climax. The increasingly sinister spaces of the other world are replaced with expanding, loving family relationships. The contrasts are strong, as are the characterizations. While there are other dreamworlds in other books, Mahy's Viridian is unique in its slow slide from entrancing to spellbinding, its transformation from a place of beauty to one of menace and danger. Created from stereopticon slides and imagination, it has gone beyond the boundaries of the slide holder and the mind, and assumed a chilling reality of its own--no longer controlled, but controlling. Cool, careful crafting. --Patricia Manning, Eastchester Public Library, NY