HIS BANNER OVER ME

From the author of Bats About Baseball (p. 713) and so many other works, another example of exceptional storytelling, unforced and powerful. Here she carves slices of the family history of the GauldsCanadian missionaries in Taiwanwhose heroine is Little's mother. Readers meet her when she is five and living in Taiwan and follow her through the big and little episodes of her life, real and half-real, sad departures and happy reunions, her move to Canada at age nine, and another move to her aunt's as a young teenager, where she is surrounded by a crowd of brothers, sisters, and assorted relatives. The book ends when she is 17, after providing a sketch of everything that happened later. A work of fiction based on true events, Little's narrative is a complicated, remarkably cohesive work, with a variety of characters, emotions, settings, and ideas. Little gives the impressionbecause she does not try to fill in all the events, but simply lands here and there, and because she does not deliberately flesh out the characters, but rather talks about them as if they are people readers already knowthat the stories are part of much larger context. The book becomes steadily more difficult to put down; the ease with which the narrative unfolds, the confidence with which Little avoids unnecessary explanations, and the sense of authority with which she takes any liberty she wantsit's extraordinary. (Fiction. 11+)