Sang Spell - Hardcover

Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689820070 ISBN 13: 9780689820076

Publisher: Atheneum, 1998

Synopsis

After Josh is mugged, a kind woman takes him to her village to tend to his wounds, but upon recovering, Josh soon learns of the town's strange rules that state he is never allowed to leave, and Josh is forced to devise a plan of escape.

About this title

Review

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor earned countless fans with the touching morality of Newbery Award-winning Shiloh and the laugh-out-loud realism of Achingly Alice. But aficionados may be surprised to find that Naylor's Sang Spell reads more like a haunting mystery. Grieving over the sudden death of his mother, Josh Vardy is reluctantly hitchhiking to Dallas (to begin a new life with his aunt), when he is mugged and left beside a remote mountain road. A woman driving a horse and cart takes him to a strange, fog-bound, primitive village, where there are no cars or telephones or electricity. The homespun villagers turn out to be a long-lost people of mixed ethnicity, called Melungeons. They accept Josh into their community, but will only answer his questions with evasiveness and enigmas. Mavis, a broad-shouldered young woman his own age, befriends Josh when he is put to work with the others gathering ginseng, a valuable root they refer to as "'sang" and trade once a year to Chinese merchants. Over and over again Josh tries to escape--by road and by river--but finds that somehow all routes lead back to this village that time has forgotten. When Josh finally joins in the villagers' rituals and celebrations, his feelings of despair about his own future begin to transform and heal. And after his loyalty to the Melungeons is tested, Josh finds that he is free at last to make the decision to leave. (Ages 11 to 15) --Patty Campbell

From the Inside Flap

Rifkin
4 hours 47 minutes, 3 cassettes

Josh is hitchhiking from Boston to Dallas to begin a new life, trying to sort out the changes that have skewed his world since an accident killed his mother and made a mockery of his dreams. No longer will he be what he was—an important person in a high school he loved. Instead he will be starting his junior year in a place where no one will know him, on one will care.

He wanders up a road he has taken away from the interstate, where he has been thumbing rides, looking for a village where he might find shelter from the unexpected August cold and rain. When a car comes along, it looks like a ride to somewhere. And that's what it proves to be. But the somewhere he finds is not the somewhere he expected. It is a place that knows him, knows the darkness inside of him; that offers food and shelter, and also confronts him with choices he does not know how to make. It probes his past, examines his possible futures, and finall

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0689820070
• ISBN 13: 9780689820076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192