cover image Travels with Rainie Marie

Travels with Rainie Marie

Patricia Martin. Hyperion Books, $15.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-7868-0257-9

Twelve-year-old Rainie Marie keeps an acorn in her pocket, hoping to become as rooted as the big old oak in the park behind her apartment. In the meantime, she, along with her two sisters and three brothers, are passed among relatives while her emotionally unstable mother endures her ""dark days."" Soon after the story opens, the children are packed off again, this time to stay with their great-grandmother. In the tradition of Vera and Bill Cleaver's Where The Lilies Bloom, Martin's first novel shows how a plucky girl takes charge of a brood of siblings (characterized as little more than a noisy mob), but while the Cleavers' heroine eventually yields to the wisdom and authority of a sympathetic adult, Rainie Marie remains steadfast to her goal of returning to her ailing mother and single-handedly running the household. The first-person narrative has some poetic moments (""Mama was a tiny person, except for her big eyes. They were deep as two black holes in outer space, and when you looked intently into them, you felt like you could fall in""), but offers a too idealistic remedy for a dysfunctional family. In the end, Rainie sneaks the kids back to Mama; while some will read the children's return as a joyous occasion, the author has planted enough information about the mother's instability that others will find this ""triumphant"" conclusion hollow. Ages 9-13. (May)