An Impossumble Summer - Hardcover

Grade 3-6-- Is a talking opossum who gives away good luck possible or ``Impossumble?'' Rianne is old enough, at ten, to be skeptical, but the creature she and her little sister help escape from the pet farm certainly does speak, and the family does run into good fortune. Only later does the Impossumble (a.k.a., the opossum) explain that laws of luck are the same as laws of physics--for every bit of good luck there is an equal and opposite bit of misfortune. Thus, when Rianne's father is held hostage by terrorists, she knows that she has to start negotiations with the animal. This pleasant cautionary tale has sparks of intrigue similar to Norton's The Borrowers (HBJ, 1953), or O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Atheneum, 1971), with an idea close to that in the Stermans' Too Much Magic (Lippincott, 1987), but sadly, does not fulfill its promise. The absolute magic of the Impossumble's tiny bedroom in the basement is lost to readers when she decides to move instead to the woods. Although the human characters are engaging, pleasant people facing real, everyday situations in the midst of ``maybe'' magic, their story is not compelling. Fodder only for the most voracious of fantasy readers. --Jody McCoy, Casady School, Oklahoma City
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Coming from an overseas posting, Rianne, Shannon, and Abe find their new neighborhood--a plastic community a stone's throw from the State Department, where their father is chief of security--impossibly stodgy. Then they meet an ordinary-looking opossum who talks and gives away luck that's quite real, as Rianne learns when she buys a winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately, the good luck is always countered by bad--a scary automobile accident, a tree falling through the roof; when the bad luck escalates to having their father taken hostage by terrorists, the kids swear off further opossum meddling. After all, the animal couldn't even save her own woods from destruction. So much doesn't add up here that the book doesn't quite make it as humor or suspense: e.g., though the opossum talks, she insists on dumb-animal status; and the bad luck is far out of proportion to the good. The moral seems to be either: Don't mess with Mother Nature, or press your luck--or make bad puns like ``impossumble.'' (Fiction. 10+) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.