THE KEY TO THE PLAYHOUSE

Each summer Megan and Alice spend two weeks at Gran's, where a playhouse built for their mothers is now the cousins' special domain. This year, Alice decides it needs a lock and key. It's a good thing that Gran agrees, because Cissie has just moved into the dilapidated house down the road. Though Gran wants the girls to include Cissie, they slyly resist, literally leaving her outside looking in. Only in the last chapter do the cousins begin to empathize with Cissie, who has meanwhile tried to re-create their lovely playhouse on her own ramshackle porch, and who doesn't even lift her head to acknowledge their good-byes. This theme has been treated before, notably in Estes' The Hundred Dresses; York's denouement comes so late that the cousins' shamed resolve to leave the door unlocked next summer isn't quite enough to allay Cissie's sadness—or the reader's. Very like real life. (Fiction. 7-10)