THE IN-BETWEEN DAYS

"The ice looks so still, but I know everything is moving out there, the pieces fitting themselves together," says 11-year-old George of the frozen harbor beyond his house. In one elegant sentence, Bunting (Night of the Gargoyles, p. 1122, etc.; A Day's Work, see above) manages to convey the shifting and unstable world of a child whose mother has died. This book, which is about George's father's remarriage, quietly and accurately captures the way feisty George tries to turn his grief into anger, and finally fails. It is marred by dialogue that is at times too elegant ("Oh, surely they wouldn't," the preteen thinks when someone mentions remarriage; "And I send mine to her," says a five-year-old boy when told someone has sent their love his way). But we're always swiftly lured back to where we belong — the child's perspective — whether pondering the odds of being grabbed by an octopus or wondering if Santa's going to make it through a storm. Beautifully rendered, from the depiction of the in-between days of Dove Islanders waiting for an ice-bridge of discarded Christmas trees to be built to the myriad odd little places Bunting finds love (in one scene it's a badly knitted scarf that's too long because the knitter "just didn't want to stop"). Powerful and poignant. (Fiction. 8-12)