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Reviewed by:
  • A Very Fine Line
  • Deborah Stevenson
Johnston, Julie A Very Fine Line. Tundra, 2006198p ISBN 0-88776-746-X$18.95 R Gr. 5-8

The youngest of the Kemp girls in 1941, thirteen-year-old Rosalind is increasingly becoming a trial to her mother, who suspects that she has inherited the family talent for "knowing things," a gift Mrs. Kemp officially refuses to acknowledge. Rosalind begins to realize that it's true, that her flashes of intuition are more than mere lucky [End Page 255] coincidence, after discovering that she is indeed the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter (her oldest sister, mentally disabled Lucy, has been long passed off as the charge of her great aunts) and after foreseeing a sister's serious accident. Her determination to avoid her fate leads her to deny her gender and pass as a boy, a ruse that seems effective at first, until events lead Rosalind to realize that she's shutting off her life even as she shuts off her destiny. Despite the supernaturally touched plot, this is really a story about family and identity, wherein Rosalind must balance her mother's denials and her own reservations with her need to be fully herself. Through Rosalind's narration, Canadian author Johnston excels in perceptive, often quietly witty observations of daily life ("Her goal in life," says Rosalind of her mother, "was to have us all turn out to be a credit to her"), and relationships and characters are evoked with compact clarity. The war looms as a backdrop, but it's believably treated as a faraway concern that only sharpens into focus when it touches a loved one or results in domestic consequences, including a family tragedy. The psychic note will appeal to more fantastically inclined readers, but this will find its best place with those who appreciate well-crafted and original stories of growing into one's own in the face of a complicated family history.

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