The Song from Somewhere Else

When she's rescued from a gang of bullies by Nicholas Underbridge, Frank (short for Francesca) Patel is relieved but horrified. Relieved to escape; horrified that weird Nick, the school outcast, has helped her. And Nick's home life is even stranger than Frank could have imagined: when he invites her home, she hears beautiful music issuing from the basement--music composed and played by a troll-like creature, "mountainous and gray, mossy-eared and flat-faced." This is Nick's mother, a being who lives in a world only occasionally connected to ours, and from which, through an "unplugged hole in the realities," Nick slipped as a baby. Even that intermittent contact is dangerous, however; and when Frank spills the secret to the bullies, she puts Nick--and, she learns, the whole world--at risk. "There are people out there...who are always looking for these leechways between worlds. People who'll take it and point it at some other other world. At somewhere more dangerous than where Nick's from. And it won't just be a window anymore. They'll force it open and let things out." Harrold's story smacks of fairy tale, fable, and dream. It's also rooted in familiar issues: the boring nastiness of bullies; the testing of courage. Harrold's incisive, poetic way with words, often dryly comic, enlivens even mundane descriptions; even more, it intensifies the vague darkness of his otherworldly imagery. Pinfold's shadowy art deepens the story's air of mystery and threat, at times filling double-page spreads, at times creeping in from the margins of pages to cloud the print itself. deirdre f. baker