cover image The Hunky-Dory Dairy

The Hunky-Dory Dairy

Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Harcourt Children's Books, $14.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-15-237449-5

Following The People in Pineapple Place, Bailey's Window and other deft blends of magic and everyday doings, Lindbergh's latest is another winner. Brinkloe's atmospheric scenes illustrate the story told by Zannah McFee, 11. Early one morning, Zannah climbs into the back of a horse-drawn milk wagon. The driver, who doesn't know she's there waiting to buy a quart, starts up, not stopping until he arrives at the Hunky-Dory Dairy. Here a small group of people live, lost in the year 1880, when they were imprisoned on a bit of land invisible to outsiders in the modern world. The milkman had discovered them accidentally; he brings the ""removed'' ones necessities bought by their milk sales. Zannah and the old-fashioned children are entranced by each other and she returns again and again, bringing her widowed mother Patty. The wily girl hopes Patty will wed the colony's leader Hector Graybeal, a handsome, though unduly strict man. The story is full of surprises and fun, capped with an unpredictable but gratifying realization of the narrator's dreams. (812)