This month's book reviews

To pay for a motorbike, a farm boy has to work
with the migrant workers

Joe Pederson really wanted that motorbike from the catalog for his fourteenth birthday. But Joe's dad said no, fifty dollars was all he was getting for his birthday. The motorbike cost over a thousand, once taxes and shipping were added. His dad said Joe could work with the Mexican workers on the farm and be paid minimum wage. Of course, Joe would rather hang out with his friends at the pool all summer. Joe figured if he worked half the summer, though, he'd earn enough for the bike. Then he could hang out with his friends and loaf the rest of the summer.

Joe had to report for work on the first day of summer vacation. Naturally, his so-called friends at school had made fun of him. The first day on the job, Joe imagined the farm workers were laughing at him. They spoke Spanish among themselves and Joe had not bothered to learn the language. They worked a lot faster than he did, and they never seemed to get tired. After a couple of days of hard, sweaty work, Joe wasn't too sure he could stick it out.

The foreman on the job was Manuel. It turned out that Manuel was only sixteen - just two years older than Joe. Except for a young worker, who turned out to be a girl named Luisa, the workers were all older than Manuel. Luisa had dark, flashing eyes and pretty, black hair, partly hidden under a baseball cap. What would she think of Joe's slowness on the job and his bleeding hands?

As the story goes on, Joe comes to respect Manuel as a hard worker and a good foreman. Joe gets to know Luisa better, and develops a crush on her, even though her cousin, Manuel, tries to keep them apart. Joe learns that both Manuel and Luisa are in the U.S. as workers because of family troubles at home in Mexico.

As the summer work continues, Joe finds that he is less concerned with buying a motorbike and spending time with his friends from school. He is totally turned off by his former friends making fun of the Mexican workers in the community. When his family has to leave for a trip, Joe is left in charge of the home and farm. Firecracker-throwing vandals and harassing immigration agents had been coming around and causing anxiety among the farm workers. Joe has some hard decisions to make, some of which may lead to his violating the law. Can Joe prove himself strong enough to do the right thing? .

 

A girl moves into her mother's old family home
and finds ghosts live there

This is a crazy book. And that's no put down. The author would agree. She intended to make it that way. The chapters alternate. One is about the "real" people in the story. The next chapter is about the "ghosts" who are "living" in the same house with the real people.

The main character in "Lily's Ghosts" is, of course, Lily. She and her mother had just been forced to move from their house in Montclair, New Jersey, because her mom couldn't pay the rent. They moved to her mom's family's old summer home near the seashore. Nobody had lived there for years. And the place looked like it. It gave Lily the creeps. When some of her possessions started disappearing from one place and appearing in another, Lily really was freaked out. Julep, her cat, didn't seem to be comfortable in the old place either.

Uncle Wesley had been the one who said Lily and her mom could stay in the old family summer home. The family had never approved when Lily's mom married "out of her class." Since Lily's dad had left them some years before, Uncle Wesley wasn't above saying "We told you so." Naturally, Lily's mom didn't like accepting anything from her family. But, times were desperate.

Anyway, back to the ghosts. There is an incredible collection of them and they are all pretty zany. It took Lily awhile to realize one of the ghosts was her Uncle Max, who had died in a house fire in this same house many years before. The plot gets really complicated with people (and ghosts) coming and going. As Lily and her new boyfriend unravel things, they solve a murder mystery and find a long-hidden treasure. To make it even more interesting, they almost get killed themselves while doing all this. If you like mysteries with a wise-cracking young girl as the major character, you'll love this one.

 

Annie was told "Don't open those boxes!"
but, of course, she did

Annie had lost her parents to an accident when she was still an infant. She was taken in by her Aunt Ruth, who never let Annie forget what a sacrifice it had been for her aunt to take this poor orphan in. Her aunt was constantly threatening to send Annie to an orphanage "where she belonged." The bright spot in Annie's life was her Uncle Marco, who traveled a lot on mysterious missions. Aunt Ruth was jealous because she could see Annie liked her Uncle Marco a lot better than she did her Aunt Ruth. Ruth controlled the family money, and she was always threatening to take away Marco's monthly support checks.

When Marco was just about to leave on another one of his mysterious journeys, he called Annie aside. He showed her two fairly big boxes that he wanted her to keep for him while he was away. She was to hide one in her room and one down in the basement. She was never to open the boxes. Above all, she was not to let her Aunt Ruth discover them. Luckily, Aunt Ruth was afraid to go down the basement. The upstairs box could be hidden in Annie's closet and covered with clothes.

On the very day Marco left town, Annie was burning up with curiosity and eager to open at least one of the boxes. She had a friend at school - Henry - that she gradually told about the boxes. She had opened up the one in her room. It was a strange looking thing like a windup clock with helicopter blades. She could have sworn it moved when she took the lid off the box. By the way, she couldn't get the lid back on!

A little later, when her aunt was gone, she opened the one in the basement. A strange, metal crab-like creature jumped out and ran away to hide in the shadows. As Annie stayed around the basement box, she felt like the creatures in the box, as well as the one out running around, could enter her mind and communicate their thoughts. Finally, all the creatures were out of the box. They started to multiply by having little creatures. Then, they began to build a structure in the basement.

A company called "Crutchley Enterprises" was trying to buy all the houses in Annie's neighborhood. Only Henry's family and her Aunt Ruth were holding out, not wanting to sell to Crutchley Enterprises. If Aunt Ruth weakened and sold the old house, what would happen to the creatures from Uncle Marco's boxes, whatever they were?

The plot gets more and more complicated. Henry and Annie find out they really are in danger. They just didn't quite know what to do about it.