The Story Web, by Megan Frazer Blakemore

If you are in the mood for a very moving book about the power of stories, and how they connect us to each other, do pick up The Story Web, by Megan Frazer Blakemore! (middle grade, Bloomsbury, June 4, 2019)

Alice's dad was the shining light of her small town in Maine, and the light of Alice's life (her mother is loving too, but very busy), with his stories and fun and ice-hockey playing (Alice is a wicked good goalie).  But then he went to war, and when he came back, he wasn't shining any more, and now he's gone.  He writes her letters, full of love and fully of whimsical mythological reimagined bits of his life, but he doesn't say when he'll come back to her.   Blaming herself, she turns away from her best friend Lewis and her beloved hockey.

When she was five, her father took her into the woods and showed her a giant spider web.  It was a story web, whose spiders were given strength by true stories they were told.  Now the story web is failing, and it seems to be taking Alice's community down with it.  Another girl, Melanie, is the only person who knows of this problem, and she's determined to get Alice and Lewis to help her fix it.  But Melanie is the niece of an eccentric woman the townsfolk say is a witch, and neither she nor her aunt have friends in town.

The world of this town is not just it's people, though.  The animals in the woods around it know about the story web too, and they're sending envoys to Alice so that she can use the gifts for story that she learned from her father to encourage the spiders again.  And so at last Alice, Lewis, and Melanie join forces, and not only is the web restored, but Alice finds the courage to tell her community true stories they need to hear--about her father, about Melanie's aunt, and about herself.

And so the reader gets a pretty strong nudge to think about the power of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, how the stories we tell can sometimes show more about ourselves than about the people in them, and how stories, whether they are true or not, can change lives. It's not a didactically presented Message, but it is a powerful one.

What's really lovely about this book though is Alice's pain and her struggle through to the other side of it, with help from Lewis, who never wanted to stop caring about her, and Melanie, who never had friends before.  Her dad's struggle with mental illness is moving, and I especially like that he never stopped loving his family, nor they him (mental illness doesn't automatically mean dysfunctional parenting....).

It's warm and loving and hopeful, and the characters (except the not so nice ones) are real and loveable, and although the story web itself requires a huge suspension of disbelief, the thinking animals, acting to save it, bolster the magic and give it a place to stand.  (If you can't believe in the actual web with magical spiders, you can just think of it as a metaphor.)  I think it's my favorite of Megan Frazer Blakemore's books so far...

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher