SEVEN SPELLS TO SUNDAY

When two foster children write their names on an old mailbox found in a junkyard, they both begin to receive strange messages. Monnie, almost ten, gets a miniature broom with the words "sweep clean," a "Voo-don't" doll that brings good to people, and a mirror from which emerges another Monnie who does the bad things that the real Monnie had wished to do. For Bim there's a small wand, a strange little light, and finally a silver star through which both children are transported to an old house with a mysterious old woman knitting fates and the doubles of both children taunting and tempting them. Overcoming their "bad" selves in an undramatic encounter, the two are released; the seventh and last gift from the mailbox is a pair of miniature houses just like the one Monnie had always dreamed of—and, they learn, just like the one to which both will be going to live until they grow up. But the magic is as arbitrary as the real-life happy ending, the gifts mostly mechanical gimmicks with no compelling power, and the self-confrontations perfunctory.