Thirteen year old Sylvia was found alone in a storm as a very young child, and was taken in by Highground, a temporary home and school for children in difficult circumstances. She watched as the other children went home or found new foster homes, but Highground was always home for her. When she herself was fostered out, she always ran away back to it, where the horses she loved some much were waiting for her. And this is how we meet her, stowing away in the back of a truck in a storm. She had tried to stay at her latest placement, but with a hurricane hitting North Carolina hard, she couldn't stand not being back at Highground to make sure the horses were safe....
When she arrives in darkness and wind and torrential rain, her worst fears are realized. The barn is empty. And so she sets out to bring them to safety through the flooding. The horses are not all she rescues; out in the storm she saves a boy about her own age, Jorna, from drowning. He's adamant that she not tell anyone she's seen him, as he is in trouble with the law back home upstream from Highground. When she hears his story, she is determined to help him.
This is not all that is strange about the flooding river--glowing with strange blue light, it's carrying along creatures that have no business at all in 21st century North Carolina.
Figuring out what's happening, helping to care for the horses, and keeping Jorna hidden, safe, and fed, all the while worrying about her future (Highground has taken her in again, but the authorities are displeased) is a lot. To help Jorna get home again safely is even more....the river that brought him to Sylvia is indeed extraordinary, and to unravel its secrets means dangerous adventuring through the still flooded landscape.
In the end, all the pieces fall into place, and Sylvia finds her very own family who had been grieving for her ever since she herself had been swept away by floodwaters.
So since this is a Timeslip Tuesday post, I must say that Jorna is from the 19th century, and the river is bringing extinct fauna from a wide variety of ancient and more recent periods. The author had to walk a difficult line between making Jorna not immediately recognizable as a 19th century kid, while still leaving clues, and he did this pretty well (except that I would expect more differences of language then was the case here...). And although the time travel river has to be taken as a given, it did have a certain logic to it. So it was just fine time travel wise, except that this wasn't a book that was centered on exploring the repercussions and experience of time slipping. The time travel was a mechanism for a story that was ultimately one of finding home.
It also works well as an exciting disaster/adventure story, and there is also a lovely thread of Sylvia's interest in nature (the book includes illustrations form her notebook). In short, there is much that should please the intended audience.
(The one thing that did not please me was one of Sylvia's horse decisions--her favorite horse collapses exhausted after the first evening of swimming through the flood, but the next day Sylvia makes it canter while carrying both her and Jorna. There's lots of additional horses being pushed too hard as well, although these weren't anyone's fault....Probably as a 10 year old I would have loved the horsey bits best, but as a grownup I liked the bits that focused on what was happening at the home/school better....)
(It was hard reading this while an actual hurricane was causing devastation to the very same part of North Carolina. The flood in the book was meant to be terrible, but it didn't come close to real life.)
disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher
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