22 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020IF YOU READyour way through childhood,
you’ll feel a flash of recognition when you
meet Abi, the 11-year-old heroine of Hilary
McKay’s utterly enchanting new novel, THE
TIME OF GREEN MAGIC (McElderry Books, 240
pp., $17.99; ages 8 to 12).Abi is “hunched
over her book like a diving bird on the edge
of a pool, poised between worlds,” so im-
mersed in an old copy of “The Kon-Tiki Ex-
pedition” that she can taste the Pacific’s
salt spray from her perch in North London.
Then something uncanny happens. Her 6-
year-old stepbrother, Louis, enters the
room and sees a flicker of green — a
glimpse, “no more than a wing tip,” of the
parrot that flew alongside the Kon-Tiki.
That moment propels an increasingly
magical story, involving, like many of the
best children’s books, a move to a more ver-
dant abode, an absent mother and much-
needed repair work — to a neglected house
and an isolated young soul who lives to
read. “The Time of Green Magic” is, in part,
a book about loving books. McKay refers to
Narnia and Hogwarts, and though she
doesn’t mention Edwardian classics like
“Five Children and It” or “The Secret Gar-
den,” she nestles her story so snugly in the
literary canon that you can imagine E. Nes-
bit and Frances Hodgson Burnett fluttering
nearby like kindly, aging aunts.
But Burnett’s world of starched pin-
afores and exotic Indian servants is more
than a century old. McKay sets “The Time
of Green Magic” in contemporary London,
busy with traffic, smartphones, working
parents. Abi’s family reflects the city’s di-
versity. Her father, Theo, an emergency
room nurse, moved from Jamaica to Britain
as a child. After Abi’s mother died, Abi was
raised by her adored grandmother. But
Abi’s father has remarried and Granny
Grace has returned to Jamaica. Suddenly
Abi must adjust to life with Louis, teenage
Max and their “brilliantly bossy, resource-
ful and kind” mother, Polly, whose work foran international charity takes her, perhaps
conveniently, abroad.
Shortly before Polly flies off, this patch-
work family is forced to move. There’s not
much on the market they can afford, but
one house — “like no other house they had
ever seen” — sits empty at the bottom of a
street that ends in “a dark bank of yew
trees.” Ivy covers it on all sides, and by the
front door is “a lantern straight out of Nar-
nia.” Inside, the air smells “of long ago.”
The stairs are “the sort you fly down in
dreams.” McKay’s evocation of the house
will set readers tingling with anticipation,
because there is something both welcom-
ing and eerie about the place. “Nothing
wrong with a bit of eer!” says the perpetu-
ally cheerful Theo.
Fortunately, this is not some urban out-
post of the Spiderwick Estate. McKay’s
“green magic” unfolds more organically —
from that first flicker of a parrot’s feathers
to the arrival, in Louis’s bedroom, of a mys-
terious “cat-thing” (“golden-eyed, hot-
furred, heavy-pawed”). For Louis, who
hates books and is prone to tears, love for
the cat-thing makes up for “the missing-
ness of Polly.” Just as he could see Abi’s par-
rot, so, it turns out, can Abi see Louis’s cat.
The two children, previously at odds, work
together to figure out what to do with it asits claws, and teeth, become increasingly
real. This is no Aslan — and was even Aslan
really suited to domestic life?
There’s a spectrum of magic at work, not
all of it emanating from Abi’s books. There’s
magic in the instant when Polly and Theo
fall in love, in the fact that Louis can be
weeping one moment and sound asleep the
next, in the way sharing secret worlds
transforms warring siblings. Abi, once so
quiet it was as if she “vanished,” becomes
generous enough to love and brave enough
to act.
Green magic has “swept through the
house and bowled them over and changed
their world and fixed it,” McKay writes. The
real magic, of course, is all hers; and her
pitch-perfect, up-to-date prose should
make this book an instant classic. 0Something uncanny happens when a girl in London
buries herself in a book about the South Seas.
By SARAH HARRISON SMITH
SARAH HARRISON SMITH,a former editor at The
Times, teaches writing at Johns Hopkins
University.
Children’s Books/ Novels
EVERYONEknows you’re not supposed to
judge a book by its cover, but many of us do
it anyway. In the case of Joan Bauer’s 14th
novel, RAISING LUMIE (Viking, 288 pp., $16.99;
ages 10 to 13),you might see the jacket pho-
tograph of a fuzzy yellow Labrador retriev-
er puppy and assume you’re in for a cozy,
heartwarming tale. You would be wrong.
Sort of.
Bauer’s story of a 12-year-old girl train-
ing a guide dog contains plenty of touching
and gratifying moments. In fact, it’s so
jam-packed with inspiring canine cuteness
I kept having to excuse myself to dole out
treats to my exuberant mutt. But “Raising
Lumie” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a sad
story wrapped in an uplifting one whose
core you never quite forget, no matter how
tickled you are by its woolly exterior.
Like Walt Disney, Bauer wastes no time
dispensing with parents. Olive Hudson
doesn’t remember her mom, who died in a
car accident when Olive was 2; her dad, a
plumber named Joe, has just died of can-
cer. (To her credit, Bauer avoids euphe-
misms like “passed.”) Olive’s grandmother
is alive and appears to have all her marbles
(as my grandmother used to say), but the
orphaned middle schooler is dispatched to
a different New Jersey town to live with
Maudie, a half sister she barely knows.
Olive is a list-maker — it’s how she keeps
grief at bay — so in her honor here are
some facts about Maudie: She works as a
graphic designer. She’s engaged to Roger,
whose best asset is a fancy car. She’s un-
flappable and unfailingly cheerful.
Either Olive is the most amenable ado-
lescent on the planet or the ones in my or-
bit are just unusually crotchety. She’s sad
to leave everything and everyone she has
ever known, but also totally game to relo-
cate with Maudie to the Stay Awhile, a big
yellow boardinghouse shared by a cast of
charmingly quirky residents including a
free-range rabbit named Bunster. Olive
even performs a plumbing miracle mid-
move; she fixes a spraying faucet in the
home of a complete stranger, leaving be-
hind a note: “This repair is in honor of Joe
Hudson, the best plumber in America.”Very young readers may appreciate
Olive’s “Leapin’ lizards!” approach to seis-
mic change, but kids her own age may not
buy it — at least not this summer, when it
seems as if loss is everywhere.
Lumie is by far the best character in this
book. She’s the 8-week-old puppy Olive
meets when she joins Maudie for her first
day at her new job. (Puppies, cinnamon
buns and young relatives welcome?
Where do I apply?) According to Olive, Lu-
mie is “the most adorable dog in North
America... a little fur machine that is 150
percent ON.” And she just happens to be
hanging around the office in preparation
for her future role as a guide dog.
By the time Lumie’s designated “raiser”
gets waylaid at a funeral in Germany, Olive
is the obvious candidate to work with the
pup. Everyone at the Stay Awhile is on
board, including Bunster. Olive tells Lu-mie, “I’m here to help you get ready to do
big things in the world” — and she cer-
tainly holds up her end of the bargain. If
Bauer’s book is made into a movie, this will
be the montage scene: girl and dog explor-
ing the neighborhood, practicing leash
skills, delighting friends and strangers.
When Olive starts seventh grade, Maudie
sends regular newspaper-style dispatches
about Lumie’s behavior; they’re an excel-
lent icebreaker for Olive to read aloud in
the school cafeteria.
Of course this is a temporary arrange-
ment. The idea is for Olive to pass Lumie
along to an owner whose world she’ll open
in the same way she has opened Olive’s.
This plan has hitches — some more upset-
ting than others — but Olive is a survivor,
which makes her fun to root for, and Lumie
is as dear to the reader as any human.
“Raising Lumie” is a touching, opti-
mistic story about decent, well-intentioned
people, which should be enough to earn it a
spot on the shelf of any tween dog-lover.
Maybe I’m getting cynical in middle age,
but I kept unzipping Bauer’s carefully
spun fleece and finding myself face to face
with the aforementioned wolf. I wonder,
would a puppy and a pack of strangers re-
ally take away the pain of Olive’s loss?
Would they even make a dent? Hard to say.
But who wouldn’t want to live in a world
where the answer is yes? 0Training a future guide dog helps a newly orphaned
girl begin to heal.
By ELISABETH EGAN
ELISABETH EGANis an editor at the Book Re-
view and the author of “A Window Opens.”