SPYHOLE SECRETS

Voyeurism becomes a route to healing for a girl overwhelmed with grief. Eleven-year-old Hallie’s life has been turned upside-down since her father was killed in a car accident and her mother has had to relocate to a dingy old apartment building in a city far from where Hallie grew up. Resentful toward her mother and unwilling to make friends in her new school, she finds respite from her misery by peeking out through a crack in a boarded-up attic window into an apartment in the building right next door. There she sees a beautiful teenage girl, her younger brother, and their perpetually angry father—does he pose a threat to his children? At first she just makes up stories about them, and then, when she makes friends with the little boy at the library, she involves herself actively in her fantasies about them. Very few writers can do atmosphere better than Snyder (Gib and the Gray Ghost, 2000, etc.), and the scenes of Hallie up in the stifling attic waiting breathlessly for the drama next door to unfold are highly effective. Somewhat less effective, but absorbing nevertheless, are Hallie’s detective efforts to discover just what is going on with that unhappy family. The answer is a letdown to Hallie (and to the reader), but without being aware of it, she has let her active grieving go in favor of her interest in the living—which is, of course, the burden of the story. For all its obviousness, it is a deftly told story with sympathetic characters, from one of the real veterans in the field. (Fiction. 10-12)