PENNY FROM HEAVEN

Penny, almost 12, is caught between two extremes: her mother’s small, uptight, WASP family, and her dead father’s large, exuberant, Italian one. Summers, she moves freely between them, mediating as best she can between the two. Her best pal is her cousin Frankie, with whom she delivers groceries from her uncle’s store, worships at the shrine of the Brooklyn Dodgers and gets into trouble. No one talks about her father’s absence, and that’s beginning to bother her more and more. And even worse, her mother has begun dating the milkman. Holm has crafted a leisurely, sprawling period piece, set in the 1950s and populated by a large cast of offbeat characters. Penny’s present-tense narration is both earthy and observant, and her commentary on her families’ eccentricities sparkles. Various scrapes and little tragedies lead to a nearly catastrophic encounter with a clothes wringer and finally the truth about her father’s death. It takes so long to get there that the revelation seems rather anticlimactic, but getting to know Penny and her families makes the whole eminently worthwhile. (Fiction. 9-13)