The Time of Green Magic
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Publisher Description
Five starred reviews!
“An instant classic.” —The New York Times Book Review
From award-winning author Hilary McKay comes “a memorable family story” (Booklist, starred review) about a girl adjusting to her new home—with the help of a little magic.
When Abi’s father marries Max and Louis’s mom, their families start over together. Abi suddenly finds herself the middle child, expected to share far too much—especially with grubby little Louis. Then they move into an eerie, ivy-covered house, big enough for all of them.
But for the children, strange things start to happen in that house. Abi reads alone, and finds herself tumbling so deep into books, they almost seem real. Louis summons comfort from outdoors, and a startling guest arrives—is it a cat or something else? Max loses his best friend…and falls in love. Meanwhile, Louis’s secret visitor is becoming much too real. Now Abi, Max, and Louis must uncover the secrets of their new home—for there can be danger in even the most beautiful magic.
From award-winning author Hilary McKay comes a story that is at once enchanting and thrilling—if you don’t get lost in it first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McKay adds the fetching family at the center of this resonant novel to her rich cache of irresistible protagonists. When Abi is 11, her placid life in London with sage Granny Grace and Abi's widower father is derailed after he marries kind Polly (mother to disgruntled 13-year-old Max and affable if perpetually sticky six-year-old Louis) and Granny returns to her native Jamaica. The newly blended family moves into an ivy-shrouded old house, where "the stairs were the sort you fly down in dreams" and Abi felt that "nothing could be impossible" a premonition that proves prescient. An avid reader, Abi is transported into the pages of books, returning to find evidence of her journeys: sand on her pillow, snow in her hair. By night, Louis, who sorely misses Polly when she's away on a work trip, is visited and comforted by a mysterious "cat-thing," which, Abi and Max surmise, may have sprung from a sketchbook of cave art drawings. McKay leaves enticing ambiguity between the real and fantastical, creating an unassailable magic of her own in an incandescent portrait of family, friendship, and imagination. Ages 8 12.
