Strange, Lucy. Secret of Nightingale Wood.

Strange, Lucy. Secret of Nightingale Wood. Scholastic/Chicken House  2017  288p.  $16.99    ISBN 978-1-338-15747-5            ms/jr  Realistic Fiction      

E-BN           

After the death of her beloved brother, Henrietta is left to grieve alone when her mother becomes emotionally ill.  In desperation, her father goes abroad to work, leaving Hen to try to bring the family back together.             Sometimes the comments on a book jacket are spot on and sometimes they require a stretch of the imagination.  Readers recognize that critics come in many sizes and shapes, often offering generic, shining comments to entice readers to purchase a book.  In this case, Pam Muñoz Ryan said, “From the first page, I was entirely smitten and compelled to read on until I finished this mysterious and poignant story.”  Spot on.  The poetic style of Lucy Strange pervades this debut novel, embracing the beautiful, yet nearly tragic, story of young Henrietta, who is forced to become an adult at age 13.  Father leaves home, unable to face his wife’s deteriorating mental state.  The nanny, Jane, has her hands full, with an ill mother, a baby and 13-year-old Hen, especially when the mother becomes a bedridden patient of Dr. Hardy.  To Hen she seems to grow more distant by the minute.  Henrietta has taken to wandering the woods, especially after meeting a woman named Moth, a reclusive type who is witch-like in both actions and appearance.  Lucy Strange masterfully weaves a subplot into the main plot: apparently the previous owner of the house lost her son in the war and took her own life by disappearing at sea.  Could Moth be the woman who disappeared?  Meanwhile, Henrietta watches helplessly as Dr. Hardy takes her baby sister away and at the same time plots to put Mother in an insane asylum to receive experimental treatments that seem torturous to Hen.  Just as Henrietta is poised to watch her family fall apart, she becomes empowered, but not without help.  As if the drama were not enough for a reader, it is the way Strange tells the story that contributes equally to the novel's power.  There is sometimes a fine line between sanity and insanity, and Strange finds the words to convey this line exquisitely.

Summary: After the death of her beloved brother, Henrietta is left to grieve alone when her mother becomes emotionally ill.  In desperation, her father goes abroad to work, leaving Hen to try to bring the family back together.                             

Families-Fiction                                                       --Martha Squaresky