Review by New York Times Review
IT wasn't easy to read "Summer of the Gypsy Moths" while living with an 11-year-old whose first literary love was the "Clementine" series, also written by Sara Pennypacker. The third time I retrieved my copy from my daughter's bedroom - a tween lair crammed with bobblehead turtles, Tootsie Roll-scented lip balms and shells from every beach she's ever visited - I realized this book was the first of my literary possessions she's ever truly coveted. And with good reason: Pennypacker is a Beverly Cleary-caliber girl-whisperer; she can weave a yarn both funny and touching, with all the beloved, timeworn themes at the ready: friendship, family, loyalty, loss and independence. In "Summer of the Gypsy Moths," we meet Stella and Angel, 12-year-old polar opposites (or so they think) who are living with Stella's great-aunt Louise, caretaker of the Linger Longer Cottage Colony on Cape Cod. Stella, who craves the orderly life instilled by "Hints From Heloise" columns, lands there after being abandoned repeatedly by her flaky mother; Angel is an orphaned foster child with a prickly attitude and a penchant for mournful Portuguese fado ballads. When Louise dies suddenly, the girls come up-with a cockamamie scheme to bury her in the backyard so they can manage the cottages for the summer themselves, collecting tips from renters. They assume (incorrectly, it turns out) that Stella and her mother stand to inherit the house, so their plan is to dodge foster care by concealing Louise's death until the absentee mom returns from California or Mexico or wherever she is. Adult readers may need to suspend disbelief in the viability of this plot; for children, however, the setup is a triumph of freedom and ingenuity - the country-mouse version of E.L. Konigsburg's "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler." In that story, Claudia and Jamie fish coins out of the fountains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and outsmart security guards by standing on toilets at closing time; in this variation, Stella and Angel dig for clams when they're hungry and stave off concern from George Nickerson, owner of the Linger Longer cottages, by pretending Louise is sick. Or that she broke her foot, or that she's out with her boyfriend. Oh, and that suspicious mound in the middle of the garden? Just pumpkins. Even when they're bickering like biddies, these two make a crafty team. In Pennypacker's island world, where Stella and Angel's grim, grown-up problems are juxtaposed against the backdrop of their tenants' sunny beach vacations, logistics are not the point; connection is. Stella looks out over the cottages from her bedroom window, having just dined on tomato soup, while the families next door grill hamburgers and roast marshmallows. Her loneliness is heartbreaking: "An emptiness welled up inside me. It felt like hunger, but it wasn't in my stomach." You can't help rooting for these, industrious hoteliers as they slowly turn away from the crutches helping them limp along - Stella's collection of household hints and Angel's music and never-ending supply of Dum-Dum lollipops - and toward each other. They set up a baby-sitting service; they frolic with sea gulls; they try to fend off an infestation of caterpillars in blueberry bushes planted 20 years earlier by Stella's mom. Once the girls form a united front, everything gets easier. Stella even learns to trust George, who gently articulates the book's most important theme while examining a shattered sand dollar left behind in the cottage called Tern: "See, broken things always have a story, don't they?" She also learns that appearances are not always what they seem. The carefree teenagers on the beach might look at her and think she's just another kid with her nose in a book: "They'd never suspect the secret I was hiding. I looked up and down the beach and wondered if maybe everyone could be hiding some big secret. I sank into the warm sand, smiling at the idea of a beach full of people, tied together by their secret-hiding." Although not everybody lives happily ever after (rest in peace, Louise), there is still plenty of joy to go around. Change comes as a result of sheer girl power and gumption. By the time the blueberries ripen, the girls have sprung themselves from their Charlie Brown-style universe, where adults appear only on the periphery and are largely useless. Their caretakers may not be the people you expect, but they are the ones Stella and Angel wisely choose for themselves. Elisabeth Egan, a former books editor at Self magazine, is now an editor at Amazon.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 13, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Abandoned by her mother, 11-year-old Stella now lives on Cape Cod with her great-aunt Louise, who has taken in another foster child, Angel, as well. When Louise dies suddenly, the two girls bury her body in the garden and attempt to hide her death, fearing what will happen to them. Smart and diligent, if not friendly toward each other, the two girls form an uneasy alliance that gradually becomes a more lasting bond as they work together to hide their secret. Most memorable for the vivid scene in which the girls find Louise's body, this first-person novel is written from Stella's point of view. Though events strain credibility at times, the dialogue is convincing and the narrative drive is strong. The attractive book jacket, portraying two girls at the seaside, makes the novel look lighter than perhaps it should, given that Pennypacker's fans connect her with the Clementine books and the series reviving Jeff Brown's Flat Stanley, both for younger readers.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Two dissimilar girls forge a genuine friendship under strenuous circumstances in Pennypacker's memorable, tense novel. The story unfolds in the fresh, credible voice of 11-year-old Stella, who's been taken from her unstable single mother and sent to live with her great-aunt Louise, also caregiver to an orphaned foster child named Angel. The girls barely speak to each other until Louise unexpectedly dies and, fearing they'll be placed in another foster home, they bury her body in the garden and try to hide that she has died. Throughout, Pennypacker (the Clementine series) skillfully meshes the poignant and the comedic. Identifying with Louise's blueberry bushes ("I knew how it felt when the one person tending you disappeared"), Stella vows to save them from lethal gypsy moths. Simul-taneously becoming self-sufficient and dependent on one another, Stella and Angel bond as they take over Louise's housecleaning job and try to stave off starvation. Beautifully evoked, the novel's Cape Cod setting plays a focal role in this richly layered tale of loss, resiliency, and belonging. Ages 8-12. Agent: Steven Malk, Writers House. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-Stella is living with her great-aunt Louise on Cape Cod because her mother has abrogated her maternal responsibilities. Angel, whose parents are both gone, is there as a foster child. Sharp-edged Angel and Heloise's Hints-embued Stella could not be more different, despite their shared lack of parents. They're spending the summer helping Louise run a small group of vacation cottages and wondering what will happen next. What occurs, however, is completely unexpected. Louise dies. Facing an uncertain future, Stella and Angel have to make some choices. Their first choice-to conceal the death-is a bad one. It leads to additional decisions-good and bad-that gradually unite the girls as they work to survive and begin to understand just what "family" means. Pennypacker's heart-touching book (Baltzer + Bray, 2013) features a summer in which adults play only bit parts and the girls uncover their own strengths. At times touching and suspenseful, this is an exceptional story and Jenna Lamia reads it in Stella's voice, with other characters sporting the accents of Boston and Portugal. She brings the tale to life and makes listeners truly care about Stella, Angel, and their fate.-Teresa Bateman, Brigadoon Elementary, Federal Way, WA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Stellas great aunt Louise lives on Cape Cod, where she works tending vacation cottages for her friend George. Stella ends up there one summer when her mother takes off (yet again), as does foster kid Angel. The two girls are oil and water: Stella is obsessed with the "Hints from Heloise" clippings she inherited from her grandmother, while Angel only wants to watch Louises soaps. The two collude, however, when Louise dies of a heart attack. Neither girl has had anything but bad experience with "the authorities," so instead of reporting Louises death, they bury her in the backyard, deceive George into thinking shes laid up with a sprained ankle, and take over the management of the cottages. As preposterous as the various adult responses are to their feints, the plot does run exactly as a childs imagination would in this scenario. How to respond to the phone and the mail, how to order pizza with a credit card number and eat out of the departing vacationers refrigerators, how to make George believe that, post-sprained ankle, Louise is now busy with a gentleman callerthe girls figure it all out. They keep it up for a month, enough time to figure out what constitutes a home, and a family. If Pennypackers plot isnt totally believable, her characters are: Stella and Angel are each equally annoying and endearing, and readers will cheer them on to the fully predictable and satisfying ending. Stella and George are prone to metaphor-laden platitudes, but their tone is consistent with the overall arc of magical-summer-meets-desperate-situation. nina lindsay (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
