Synopsis
Catie Calloway’s family has moved a lot, which is rough on an only child. When Catie finds herself in another new city and another new school, she is glad to meet Josephine, a girl who appears in the big old house that is her family’s new home. With a relationship founded in loneliness, the two girls are immediately drawn to each other and happy to have each finally found a best friend. Catie’s parents, however, are beginning to question their daughter’s odd behavior. To them, it appears she hasn’t a friend in the world, and sending her away to summer camp seems to be the only answer. Unless, of course, Catie can come up with a new friend fast.
Publishers Weekly
Fuqua, who collaborated with Parke on the graphic novel In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, offers a thin tale about a friendless only child whose family is constantly uprooted. Moving into an old house in Baltimore, she spies a girl wearing an old-fashioned dress, who reappears one night in Catie's bedroom. The girl introduces herself as Josephine and later explains that she lived in the house before she died of flu in 1918. Invisible to adults, this ghost now resides in the attic, which she can transform into such locales as the setting of The Arabian Nights, a field with a castle in the distance and a dollhouse in which she and Catie become dolls. When Catie's parents threaten to send her to summer camp unless she finds a friend, she renders Josephine visible to her parents by draping her in winter clothing and painting her face with makeup and her tongue and teeth with poster paint. She then introduces her as a mute kid with the egregiously false name of Allison Wondertland. Inane passages and stiff dialogue sink this story, which comes across chiefly as a showcase for Parke's digitally manipulated color photos of fantasy sequences. Slick and stagey, the photos themselves take on a frozen, static quality that works against the notion of ghostly specters and ephemeral tableaux. Ages 7-11. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.