Half Child - Hardcover

Hersom

3.69

36 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671742256 ISBN 13: 9780671742256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1991

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In seventeenth-century Yorkshire, Lucy's younger sister Sarah is suspected by many to be a changeling, a fairy child substituted by the fairies for a human child

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Looking back from old age, Lucy Watson describes the little sister that only she really loved--``our Sarah,'' who was born when Lucy was six and disappeared a few years later, while Cromwell's soldiers were destroying churches all over England. Slow of speech and dauntingly unpredictable, Sarah was thought by many to be a changeling; when she vanished just at the time her mother died in a later childbirth, her own father named the new baby Sarah in the hope that she was his own real child returned at last. Only Lucy believed that the first Sarah had simply wandered off and might be alive; and though Lucy never saw Sarah again, she eventually learned that this was indeed what happened, and that Sarah found others to love and take her in before straying yet again. With carefully chosen detail expertly woven into her narrative, Hersom brings the life of the common people in the Yorkshire Dales of the 17th century vividly to life; her style, colored by local expressions yet easily understood (especially with the help of the short glossary), is lively and consistent, with the pleasing cadence of fine storytelling. An enriching, enjoyable mystery with an unusual cast of well-realized characters. (Fiction. 11-15) -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-7-- When Sarah is born, it is her older sister Lucy who takes to her from the start. The rest of the family, goaded on by the villagers, concludes that Sarah, who is different from other children, must be a changeling child left by the fairies and might at any time be reclaimed by them. No one but Lucy grieves when one day Sarah disappears, not to return home again. The story is told in retrospect by Lucy 55 years after Sarah's disappearance, of how she learned what befell her sister after she wandered from home as a small child. Many years later, a child resembling Sarah turns up--or is it Sarah? The story is hauntingly and beautifully told in a strong and original style. It unfolds against the background of religious and political upheaval of the Cromwell era, with Royalists battling Puritans during England's civil war. The setting richly depicts the solitude and beauty of the Yorkshire hills and dales and brings vividly to life the superstitions and beliefs of 17th-century English country folk. Royalties are to be donated to Mencap, an English organization for the developmentally disabled. --Sally R. Dow, Ossining Public Library, NY
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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