Anyway! Post number nineteen is for Annie Barrows' The Magic Half, which is another of this year's Mark Twain Award Nominee books for the state of Missouri. I really liked this one; it had a nice mix of magic and wishes and a nice feel-good ending. Quick thoughts/spoilers regarding the ending follow.
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This book is about Miri, who is the only non-twin in her family. She has a set of older twin brothers, and set of younger twin sisters. Needless to say, she feels left out a lot, and wishes more than anything that she had a twin, too. While serving a time-out in her room, she finds a glasses lens taped to her wall. When she picks it up and looks through it, it transports her to 1935. There she meets a girl her own age named Molly, and the adventure begins. Miri wants to bring Molly back to her own time – Molly is living with relatives that hate her, and an abusive cousin – but things don't work out the way she intends. In the end, with the help of a magical grandmother and some good planning on Miri's part, she does figure it out, and Molly comes back to her own time with her. There's a line about how magic has a way of setting things right, and in Miri's case, what's set right is that Molly was supposed to be Miri's twin. So, it has a nice, happily-ever-after ending, and as I've mentioned here before, I do really love those. <3
This was a nice, easy, fast read. I can see the girls at my school getting into this one, but probably not so much the boys. :-P
Read and Reviewed 