Seven Stories Up
Gr 4–6—Twelve-year-old Annie, visiting the dying grandmother she's never before met, awakes in 1937 and meets the woman all over again: a lonely girl of Annie's own age, locked away from the outside world of Depression-era Baltimore by her poor health and the wishes of her wealthy hotel-owning family. Together, the two girls seek adventures in the colorful city below. The story is ultimately about the transformative power of deep friendship and the ways new experiences can shape our lives, but Snyder also makes it about the social disparities between rich and poor, the meaning of family, standing up for oneself, and living life to the fullest. Not only is the author's well-researched 1937 Baltimore a vibrant and enticing character in its own right, but both Annie and Molly are utterly believable, engaging personalities. The perfectly paced time-travel conundrum is well balanced within the larger plot, and the entire book is imbued with the same sort of forward-driving adventure as Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me (2009) or Laurel Snyder's Bigger Than a Bread Box (2011, both Random). A wide variety of readers will find this book wonderfully satisfying and hard to put down.—Rhona Campbell, Georgetown Day School, Washington, DC