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Reviewed by:
  • Violet Mackerel’s Remarkable Recovery by Anna Branford
  • Jeannette Hulick
Branford, Anna. Violet Mackerel’s Remarkable Recovery; illus. by Elanna Allen. Atheneum, 2013. [128p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-3588-9 $14.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-3589-6 $5.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-3590-2 $5.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2–3.

Violet Mackerel (from Violet Mackerel’s Brilliant Plot, BCCB 10/12) is alarmed to find that her sore throat means that she must go to the hospital for a tonsillectomy. As she waits for surgery, her anxiety is assuaged by a lovely older lady who’s a fellow patient, and who promises to meet Violet for tea after their recoveries. Unfortunately, Violet doesn’t know how to get in touch with the lady—until she hears the woman’s voice on a call-in radio show and calls in herself to leave the woman a message (and also wangles an opportunity to try out her new and improved post-op singing voice on the air). Their reunion proves to be even more serendipitous [End Page 286] than they had realized, since the lady turns out to be the midwife who actually helped deliver Violet years ago. The story’s crucial coincidences are believable, and Violet is a truly charming kid to whom many young readers will relate. Her habit of creative thinking and theory formation, evident in the previous book as well, makes her a useful model as a problem-solver. Here she creates “The Theory of Giving Small Things”: if someone has a problem and “you give them something small like a feather, or a pebble, or a purple lozenge, that small thing might have a strange and special way of helping them.” The gentle humor, numerous illustrations, short length, and large type will make this very accessible to novice chapter book readers; the skillful writing and concise but detailed characterizations make it worth their time. Final art not seen.

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