Beyond the Magic Sphere

While staying with her country cousin, Brenda, eleven-year-old S.B. makes two new friends, with whom she discovers the value of family, friendship, and nature and averts a disaster involving a wealthy landowner and a peculiar old man. Jr Lib Guild.

Grade 5-7-When 11-year-old S.B. Field's father tricks her into spending the summer with his cousin Brenda instead of accompanying him to Europe, the girl is angry and confused. She must coexist with Brenda's sullen ward, 13-year-old Finis, who constantly bombards her with bits of gruesome trivia. Then she meets Cally, a strange girl who escapes her abusive home life by constructing a fantasy world that she enters through a mirrored, spherical ornament on Brenda's lawn. Real events (the feud between two neighbors over the removal of trees on a disputed boundary, culminating in arson) are related as a battle between the Enchanter and the Green Lord, with Finis, Cally, and S.B. assuming the roles of Water, Earth, and Air. Unfortunately, the attempt to blend mystical elements with reality is contrived and unsatisfying. There are interesting aspects to the plot (including S.B.'s background as the daughter of a rock star who left her family to pursue fame, only to be killed in a plane crash); however, too many ideas are introduced but left undeveloped. Through Brenda's kindness and insight, S.B. comes to terms with her mother's seeming abandonment and Cally finds hope for a more realistic escape from her misery; resolution of Finis's problems is less clear.
Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 4-6. Eleven-year-old S. B. Field is stranded with her father's cousin Brenda for the summer while her dad's in Europe. Her long-dead mother is something S. B. doesn't want to think about, like the "hippie name" S.ÿ20B. cloaks in initials. Nothing about S. B.'s stay with Brenda is what her father promised: Brenda reminds her of a pineapple and isn't like Dad, and there's another stray cousin, a boy a little older than S. B., living with Brenda, too. It's only after meeting Cally from up the road, who has invented an eerie fantasy game paralleling what's going on in a local property dispute, that S. B. begins to review her own disappointments. The book may not satisfy readers looking for lots of fantasy because the story ultimately delivers more down-to-earth stuff: S. B. comes to understand why Cally likes fantasy and why her father had to send her away. An appealing coming-of-age story. Mary Harris Veeder