Chatterbox: Blab About Books

So, I recently was at the library, when I saw this book, and thought, ah-ha!!!  There's one of my favorite books!!!  I'll check it out.  Well, I did.  But it had a different illustration on the cover.  Oh well, I thought.  It's just a different cover.  WRONG!!!  It was a totally different book!!

So, please make sure, if you check this book out that you get the one by A. LaFaye!!  Or you'll have the wrong one. 

 I'm going to copy the description directly from the book, because I tried to write one, but it didn't turn out at all good.

So, here goes:

For Raleia Pendle, spending the summer in Tidal, Maine, (Paige, have you been there??) sounds like the perfect antidote to the turbulent, free-spirited 1970s in which she lives.  Tidal looks almost exactly as it did in 1911, when a tidal wave (tsunami) crushed the town and killed over a hundred people.  It's the ideal place for Raleia to live out her daydreams of life at the turn of the century and to avoid her cranky pregnant mother (Tiny's not cranky!  Most of the time...) and self-absorbed father.

After hearing from some local kids about Ian Rutherford, the reclusive old (really old) man who lives in a mansion on a hill overlooking Tidal, Raleia thinks she has found her living link to the past.  But when she tries to befriend Rutherford, who has hardly left his home since the tidal wave almost seventy years earlier, Raleia discovers that the past wasn't the golden time she imagined.

In a story filled with the romance of the past and the promise of the future, a young girl who feels that she doesn't belong with her family or in her time gains a better understanding of herself and the people who care about her.  Told in the graceful, lyrical style that marked A. LaFaye's first novel, The Year of the Sawdust Man, (I didn't read that one, but I read all the sequels, and LOVED them. Worth was super good too) Strawberry Hill will touch all readers who have longed to be somewhere else.

So, I hope you read it, and enjoy it as much as I did both times I read it.  :)

P.S. The other Strawberry Hill was good too, but for a slightly younger age group. 

 Have a great day!!!  I hope it's as beautiful and warm where you are as it is here today!