The Mushroom Man

Publishers Weekly

Powell makes a charming debut with this touching comedy that explores childhood fantasies as well as messy adult truths about family relationships. Beth, a free-spirited widow with a teenage son and 11-year-old identical triplet daughters, longs to have her London sister, Charlotte, come to her Welsh farmhouse with her six-year-old daughter, Lily. One summer, the stuffy, prim Charlotte reluctantly agrees, warning Lily not to share towels or cutlery with her wild cousins ("very different people who live very differently from us"). As soon as she leaves home, her husband, Richard, pursues his dalliance with Lily's nanny. Meanwhile, much to Charlotte's consternation, Lily becomes enchanted by her triplet cousins, especially when one of them concocts a magical story about a Mushroom Man who protects fairies from the rain with his special mushroom umbrellas. When Lily disappears in the forest, the grownups panic, Charlotte says, "I told you so" and the children busily devise a plan to find their cousin. Powell contrasts the adults' frightened response (they call on policemen and search dogs) with the children's more whimsical one (they organize an army of their playmates to march into the forest shouting, "We believe in fairies"). Powell neatly juggles many elements here: sibling rivalry, a marriage gone sour, widowhood. Her wry, playful prose ("Charlotte is coming to visit Beth because she has always had a sense of duty, because she wants to display her sense of duty, and because she thinks Beth's children could do with seeing someone with a sense of duty"), assured voice and unerring eye for detail make her one to watch. Agent, Faye Bender. (Feb. 10) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An engaging debut about a family reunion that leads to a disappearance. Charlotte and Beth weren’t born to privilege, but their parents worked hard to give them every advantage, which counts for a lot in England. That’s why Charlotte found it so hard to forgive her sister for having—as she saw it—thrown away her expensive education and careful upbringing to marry a worthless carpenter who took her away from the civilized world (i.e., London’s West End) and moved her to the hinterlands of Wales. It was so hurtful, in fact, that Charlotte could not bring herself to write, call, or communicate in any way with Beth after her marriage—even though Beth continued to write. After Beth’s dreadful husband died, however, Charlotte found it in herself to forgive, and she accepted Beth’s invitation to visit her in Wales. At first the reunion was a success: Charlotte never spoke of her late brother-in-law, and her six-year-old daughter Lily hit it off splendidly with Beth’s eleven-year-old triplets Amy, Jude, and Samantha. Amy, blessed with a gift for storytelling, delighted Lily with a long narrative about the "Mushroom Man," a kindly hermit who invented mushrooms as miniature umbrellas for the fairies to keep them dry in the rain. Lily was so taken with the story that she insisted that she’d met the Mushroom Man and began to take long solitary rambles looking for him. Charlotte’s unease at her daughter’s wild imaginings turns to outright terror when Lily disappears one morning without a trace. The police are summoned to investigate what looks like a kidnapping, but the triplets wonder whether their stories about the Mushroom Man might have somehow come true—and they round up all the children of theneighborhood to take matters into their own hands. A charming and thought-provoking tale that walks the line between fantasy and reality with all the skill of tightrope-artist. The British-born Powell, now an NYU grad student, has made a splendid start.