title: The Crooked Gate
author: Donahue, Marilyn Cram
description: When Cass and her brothers are sent to spend the summer with their aunt by the beach, everything in Cass’s life seems to go wrong. It isn’t just the house they have to live in, which hangs so far over the ocean it seems like it might fall in, or her unusual aunt who appears and disappears at the strangest times and places. But her new friends, Tina and Hal, are causing trouble, too. Tina offers Cass a place within her group of friends, but at a price. Then there is tall, handsome Hal, an outsider because he is deaf, but who seems to understand Cass in a special way. Before the summer is over, Cass will make remarkable discoveries about herself and be forever changed.
  PRAISE FOR CASS AND THE CROOKED GATE:
  “Spending the summer with strange Aunt Mathailda in her even stranger house was not 13-year-old Cass’s idea of fun, especially with two pesty younger brothers. She couldn’t figure out good-looking Hal either, who seemed at peace with the world in spite of his deafness. Cass’s mother knew that Aunt Mathilda was just the person to straighten out a self-centered teenager and her brothers, and before the summer was over, remarkable discoveries were made by all and lives were changed as Aunt Mathilda ministered to each in her own special way.” – Librarian’s World