School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-7-Dillon Howell, 12, is still angry with her mother for dying six years ago. Every summer she and her dad make the requisite trip from their home in California to her mother's family farm in the Adirondacks. Dilly resents the trip, the farm, and, most of all, her mother. The only good thing about Lake Luzerne is Sasha, who is the niece of her late mother's best friend, Libby. Lately, though, Sasha is less willing to leave her life and friends in Brooklyn to make the five-hour trek upstate. When Libby tells Dilly that her dying mother left her a letter, the girl is determined to find it and tear it up unread. Her search results in finding other exchanges between Elspeth and Libby; through them, she learns that the mother she always thought was so perfect was actually spoiled and selfish. Orphaned after an accident, she was shipped off to boarding school by her snobbish Granny Tat, who bullied Libby into attending as well. Now Sasha feels bullied into coming to Lake Luzerne whenever Dilly feels lonely. There is strife between the friends until the letter is finally found and read, by which time Dillon has come to terms with her loss and her evolving friendship with Sasha. Dilly's anger is convincing-at times she sounds like the emotional six-year-old she has remained ever since her mother's death. A painful, but realistic treatment of grief and healing.-Barbara Auerbach, New York City Public Schools (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Dilly's mother died six years earlier, and twelve-year-old Dilly still feels angry at her mother. While Dilly searches for a misplaced letter Mummie wrote to her before her death, Dilly finally comes to terms with her grief and learns to forgive her mother for dying. The prose can be flowery and the letter, when found, is anticlimactic, but the characters are believable and the narrative is satisfyingly resolved. From HORN BOOK Spring 2004, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
An angry Dilly Howell, 12, blames her mother for dying six years ago and resents the control her mother still maintains over her and her father's lives. Because Mummie would have wanted it, Dilly and her father continue their annual summer vacation from their home in Pasadena to the Dillon estate in the Adirondacks. When Dilly discovers that her mother wrote a letter to her just before dying, she fears that it will only contain more demands. Her curiosity wins out, however, and her search for the letter yields other letters from her mother's past that reveal an eerie similarity between her mother's friendship and her own with an Adirondack neighbor. These letters, including that from her mother, force Dilly to confront her anger and ultimately empower her to make her own life decisions. Warner writes a poignant story of friendship and mother-daughter love that will not leave a dry eye among its intended readers. (Fiction. 10-13) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 4-7. In an unusual move, this novel opens with a prologue revealing the thoughts of a woman on her deathbed as she contemplates leaving her 6-year-old daughter, Dilly. Six years later, 12-year-old Dilly angrily packs her suitcase. Once again, she and her father will leave California to spend half the summer in the Adirondacks, as they used to do with Dilly's mother, whom she barely remembers. The tension between Dilly and the mother she imagines increases after she learns of a letter her mother wrote to her as she lay dying. Over the following weeks, Dilly searches the old summer house and uncovers secrets from the past that resonate in the present. Warner conveys Dilly's powerful, vacillating feelings toward her mother with conviction, yet this emotional core is only one aspect of the story, which also concerns Dilly's changing relationship with a longtime summer friend, her growing awareness of adults as individuals, and her realization of how the past burdens the present and what can be done about it. Peopled with complex, sympathetic characters, this is both entertaining and involving. --Carolyn Phelan Copyright 2003 Booklist
