cover image Making Room for Katherine

Making Room for Katherine

Philippa Greene Mulford. MacMillan Publishing Company, $14.95 (191pp) ISBN 978-0-02-767652-5

Mulford packs so many themes and events into her latest novel that it is sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Sixteen-year-old Abbey Reilly, her twin brother, younger sister and widowed mother are trying to forge a new life for themselves eight months after the death of much-adored Mr. Reilly. Katherine, Abbey's sophisticated younger cousin, has come from her home in Paris to spend the summer with them, supposedly because her mother is out of work--but really to avoid the man her mother is about to marry, a count who has made advances toward her. Further complications arise when Mrs. Reilly becomes engaged, a development that is hardest on the otherwise sanguine Abbey. Though the frenetic pace truthfully suggests that family life does not always proceed neatly and predictably, the story introduces more events than it satisfyingly resolves and more characters than can be convincingly developed. There is, for example, a gratuitous subplot about Katherine contacting the absentee father she has never met; and Mrs. Reilly, so apparently strict with her own children, is absurdly lenient with Katherine. It's regrettable that the author hasn't made room for all of her extremely likable characters. Ages 10-14. (Apr.)