Bird Lake Moon (review)

Mitch is full of anger and resentment when his father announces that he has found someone else and is moving out. He carries his anger with him to Bird Lake, where he and his mother will spend the summer with her parents; his resentment deepens when the perfect family comes to stay in the house next door. Moved by jealousy, he pulls a few pranks, not knowing that the family's four-year-old drowned in the lake eight years ago, and they have finally returned to see if they can bear revisiting the scene of the tragedy. Spencer initially mistakes Mitch's pranks for his brother's ghost, but when Spencer and Mitch become friends, Mitch confesses almost everything, and nothing really comes of his minor deceptions. Instead, this becomes a gentle story of the way friendship helps heal hurts and the fact that the choices we make are more important to who we become than the choices others make around us. Spencer's sister Lolly is a mite too precocious for credibility and the plot is flat at times, but Henkes' prose has a thoughtful, poetic quality that sets an appropriate tone for such a character-driven, inward-looking story. Ultimately, the book handles the coming-of-age thought processes of both boys, limned as they are with first- and second-hand grief, with grace and elegance.