The Music Box
by Toby Bennett
Category: Young adult fiction, English

“John Schmitt and his mother Maribell live in the small town of Dowdale. John is a teenage schoolboy who has just been offered an scholarship to a prestigious school. His mother is a religious fanatic and given to strange spells. She is terrified of demons and that John has something evil about him. John escapes to a cave he has discovered to get away from his mother and her odd spells. After the offer to the new school, Maribell breaks the telephone and John flees to his sanctuary, where he has his father’s tools and where he can fix almost everything, except an intriguing music box, the mechanisms of which refuse to obey his commands. After a night spent in the cave his seemingly deranged mother meets him at school and forbids him to go back until she lets him. John gives her the slip and meets up with a gypsy teen named Lu. Together they enter a world of shifting times and places, the world that the mist threatens and protects.”--Publisher’s description.