Gr 5--7-- Eleven-year-old Abi, motherless since infancy, and her recently blended family have moved into an old ivy-covered house in north London, where she must learn to navigate life between older and younger stepbrothers Max and Louis. Now that her father Theo is remarried, her beloved Granny Grace who helped raise her has moved back to Jamaica, sending her wise and encouraging letters which are the envy of six-year-old Louis. In the new house, Abi's escape into reading in her attic bedroom takes on a strange new dimension; not only does she feel herself becoming part of the stories but she finds tangible evidence of the books' settings. When stepmother Polly goes on an extended business trip, French art student Esme is hired to watch Louis after school, providing Max, 13, with his first infatuation and Louis with a mysterious night visitor, Iffen, a catlike creature derived from Esme's drawings. As Abi and Max devise a plan to rescue Louis from Iffen's growing menace, they form a bond which points the way to true familial love and loyalty. As in her "Saffy's Angel" series, McKay employs deft characterization, vivid setting, delicious humor and some beautifully lyrical language to portray the struggles and successes of what it means to be a family. VERDICT A perfect mix of magic and realism. Recommended for juvenile fantasy collections.--Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Coop. Lib. Syst., Bellport, NY

A mysterious house reveals startling secrets. Eleven-year-old Abigail is less than pleased: Her beloved Granny Grace has returned to Jamaica and her widowed father, Theo, has combined households with his new wife, Polly, and her boys, Max, 13, and Louis, 6. After moving into an ivy-covered North London house that they can--with belt-tightening--just afford, the normal upheaval of blended-family life takes an otherworldly turn. Abi emerges from reading The Kon-Tiki Expedition to find the book damp and salty. There's a flash of green wing--a parrot's?--and a mysterious tropical seashell. It's wondrous if unnerving, but Iffen is another order of magic entirely. Plaintive Louis, who loves Abi persistently and unreservedly, welcomes through his ivy-framed bedroom window a feline friend he dubs Iffen. But Iffen grows to potentially deadly proportions--while Polly temporarily works overseas, Theo picks up additional nursing shifts, ill-tempered Max simultaneously navigates an unrequited crush on the French babysitter and a cold war with his former best friend, and Abi retreats into her books. The quest to rescue Louis from Iffen ultimately saves them all. Readers will find the banter, humor, warmth, and cheerful chaos of the family's lives irresistible. Avid bookworms and die-hard book resisters alike will find sympathetic mirrors, and the latter may well be won over to reading. Abi, her dad, and grandmother are cued as black; all other characters are white. Overflowing with heart and magic. (Fabulism. 9-13) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When 11-year-old Abi and her recently blended family (father Theo, stepmother Polly, and stepbrothers 13-year-old Max and 6-year-old Louis) move into their new home, she's relieved to have her own room, but she struggles to adjust to having brothers. Soon after Polly leaves on an extended business trip, the magic starts. Interrupted while absorbed in reading Kon-Tiki, Abi finds that her book is inexplicably drenched with salt water. Louis, who longs for an owl as a companion, attracts a different creature to his bedroom: a leopard-like cat that grows from small and wild to enormous and terrifying. And Max, meeting Louis' new babysitter, experiences a different sort of enchantment: his first overwhelming, painful, life-changing crush. McKay's own magic is the ability to portray individuals, their quirky differences, and their shifting relationships in ways that seem realistic and uncommonly absorbing. Within the story, tension builds steadily on several fronts, then resolves as the characters begin to form bonds of trust and even kinship, along with the unspoken realization that they can rely on each other. The family's tall, narrow, vine-covered house has a strong presence in the novel, as both a portal between dimensions and a place where a "Narnia light" welcomes them back home. A memorable family story.

Everything changes for eleven-year-old North Londoner Abigail when her widower father marries Polly, mother of Max and Louis, and her beloved Granny Grace returns to Jamaica. Feeling both isolated and crowded at the same time in this new life, Abi finds respite in books and in the ethereal ivy-covered house where the newly configured family decides to move. Though not a practical choice, the house has "a lantern straight out of Narnia" by the door, and the storybook details prove irresistible. "Inside, the air smelt of long ago. The stairs were the sort you fly down in dreams. The colored glass in the hall windows seemed full of accumulated sunlight." Disturbingly, however, when Abi becomes deeply absorbed in a book, remnants of the story she is reading materialize inside the house -- a shell, a leaf, pages damp with saltwater. As each chapter focuses on the internal concerns of one of the three now-siblings, it becomes clear that all the children are struggling to find their place in their new circumstances. When Louis, the youngest, unknowingly conjures up a creature that may threaten his safety, Abi and Max must unite to get the magic back under control. Throughout this deftly told story, McKay (the Casson Family series, beginning with Saffy's Angel, rev. 7/02; Love to Everyone, rev. 11/18) creates a captivating world to fall into, full of honesty and humor. The warm but complicated relationships form a comforting space for readers to explore the power one can find in home, family, and books -- especially this one. Julie Roach September/October 2020 p.101(c) Copyright 2020. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

McKay adds the fetching family at the center of this resonant novel to her rich cache of irresistible protagonists. When Abi is 11, her placid life in London with sage Granny Grace and Abi's widower father is derailed after he marries kind Polly (mother to disgruntled 13-year-old Max and affable if perpetually sticky six-year-old Louis) and Granny returns to her native Jamaica. The newly blended family moves into an ivy-shrouded old house, where "the stairs were the sort you fly down in dreams" and Abi felt that "nothing could be impossible"--a premonition that proves prescient. An avid reader, Abi is transported into the pages of books, returning to find evidence of her journeys: sand on her pillow, snow in her hair. By night, Louis, who sorely misses Polly when she's away on a work trip, is visited and comforted by a mysterious "cat-thing," which, Abi and Max surmise, may have sprung from a sketchbook of cave art drawings. McKay leaves enticing ambiguity between the real and fantastical, creating an unassailable magic of her own in an incandescent portrait of family, friendship, and imagination. Ages 8--12. Agent: Molly Ker Hawn, the Bent Agency. (July)