Buttermilk Hill
Grade 4-7–Piper's narration traverses the years 1973-'77 in a small Southern town. The 10-year-old's grandparents and her aunt (who is Piper's age and her best friend) are the constants in her life as other things change. Her parents divorce, her father remarries and is subsumed by his new family, her mother completes the college education she'd jettisoned for marriage, but leaves the girl to her own devices while she works, attends classes, or goes off with a new boyfriend. All this contributes to Piper's sense of abandonment, especially when combined with the naturally occurring dislocation of early adolescence. Piper finds some solace in writing. She's long been addicted to collecting unusual words. Now she turns increasingly to poetry as an emotional outlet, eventually producing a poem that she reads aloud at the public library to high acclaim. The approbation of the adults in town awakens Piper's parents to her talents and her pain, and the book ends with the promise of better communication among them. White attempts to cover so much territory that the plot sometimes jumps abruptly from one situation to the next, and some of the characters are underdeveloped. A subplot involving the long-suppressed truth about the parentage of a boy who is friends with the two girls is interesting, but less convincing than Piper's chronicle. Still, the protagonist is real enough to hold the interest of girls on the verge of becoming teens.–Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NYCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.