The Woman in the Wall - Hardcover

Kindl, Patrice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395830141 ISBN 13: 9780395830147

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

Anna, a shy and lonely fourteen-year-old girl, retreats into the fabric of her huge old house, constructing a series of passageways that allow her to share the life of the house unseen by her mother and sisters.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrice Kindl's first novel, Owl in Love, was an ALA Notable Book for Children, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and an SCBWI Golden Kite Award Honor Book. She lives in Middleburgh, New York.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-8. Exceedingly shy Anna, 14, narrates her life story. When she is seven, her mother tells her she must go to school. The school psychologist arrives at the run-down family mansion only to mistake Anna for a doll and somehow ends up with her in her purse. This is enough to impel the child to hide in a secret room she has readied overnight by putting up a false wall in the family library. Over the years, she adds new rooms, passages, a kitchen, peepholes; and no one notices. Although she continues repairing, baking, and sewing as her family requests, gradually her mother and older sister, Andrea, choose to forget her. When one of Andrea's ignored admirers sticks a love letter addressed to "A" into a crack in the stairs, Anna answers it, thus setting in motion a chain of events that lead to her discovery. This story cannot make up its mind what it wants to be. It could be fantasy. Rooms diminish and disappear. No one pays much attention to this engineering prodigy scurrying through the walls for seven years. Yet Kindl's messy ruminations on puberty drag the story kicking and screaming back to realism. At any rate, it is a disturbing novel. Anna's mother's casual acceptance of her daughter's self-imposed isolation will be unsettling to many children, and readers are not privy to the woman's explanation of the sudden appearance of a third daughter to her soon-to-be husband. The author's shrill Victorian trill pushes the story in a gothic direction. For a more palatable offering on shyness delivered with a hint of Victorian flavor, try Jean Ure's The Children Next Door (Scholastic, 1996).?Cindy Darling Codell, Clark Middle School, Winchester, KY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0395830141
• ISBN 13: 9780395830147
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 185