Stonewords: A Ghost Story - Hardcover

Grade 5-9-- In a cemetery on an island off the northern coast of America, Zoe's unstable mother weeps for the dead, while Zoe stares at a gravestone with a single legible inscription: her own name. This scene sets the mood for an eerie and gripping time fantasy by a talented writer. Zoe tells her story, beginning when she is five and comes to live with her devoted, nurturing grandparents. She immediately discovers that their 19th-century house is haunted by Zoe Louise, a beautiful child dressed in old-fashioned clothes, eagerly anticipating her eleventh birthday party. Zoe Louise becomes Zoe's beloved playmate, invisible to grownups. Stonewords shares many devices with Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (Lippincott, 1984); comparison of the two books could stimulate a fascinating literary discussion. Conrad's Eden of backyard and playhouse becomes sinister when Zoe's mother appears and takes Zoe into the woods, where a bank of roses marks the border of an earlier garden. The roses were planted 100 years ago, Zoe's mother says, by a mother whose daughter Zoe died on her eleventh birthday and now lies buried in the cemetery. Then Zoe Louise turns spectral, decaying before her playmate's eyes, and the modern Zoe is impelled into the past, where she finds herself locked in a struggle with fate, her best friend's life at stake. Conrad's oblique evocation of horror is as intense as her portrayal of madness in Prairie Songs (Harper, 1985). The spare, vivid prose sustains the suspense, drawing readers inexorably toward a climax as satisfying as it is unexpected. --Margaret A. Chang, Buxton School, Williamstown, MA
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.