WELCOME TO CAMDEN FALLS

Orphans Flora and Ruby are moving in with Min, their maternal grandmother. Min lives in 350-year-old Camden Falls, Mass., a town filled with all sorts of people who are ready to embrace the girls. Min’s friendly sewing-and-needlepoint shop is the heart of the girls’ new world. Camden Falls, with its row houses, quirky characters and strong, level-headed women is almost a character itself. For such a small town, there is a dizzying array of folks: an older boy with Down’s Syndrome, an abused girl, a woman with Alzheimer’s, a forgetful elderly black man, a shoplifter, a cranky shop owner and a girl who lives with her widowed father. Girls who have outgrown Cynthia Rylant’s Cobble Street Cousins will find the same familiar sense of community here, and they will forgive the saccharine tone, especially when the narrator slips into the second-person voice. They will long to know how the girls fare in fourth and sixth grade and will be able to find out soon: The second in the series arrives in August just in time for school. (Fiction. 8-12)