GRASS AND SKY

In her first novel, Fraustino explores the long-term emotional fallout on a family living beyond alcoholism. It's a long, winding road that leads to Grampy's camp on Fish Lake in Maine, and 11- year-old Timmi—star pitcher for her little league team—would rather be back in Scranton. She's missing the big game to go with her parents and sister for two weeks in the wild; worse, she'll be spending the time with an old man who's never answered the letters she's been writing faithfully for years. During her first week with the die-hard old jigsaw puzzler, Timmi puts her own family puzzle together to discover Grampy's secret (alcoholism, now under control), the reason for his silence (her father returned his letters unopened), and why tidying things up is suddenly so urgent (Grampy is dying). ``An oyster makes a pearl by laying layer after layer of white to stop the itch of one little grain of sand. A secret gets covered up like that. But honesty grows like that, too- -layer after layer of truth to stop the itch of the secret.'' A nicely evoked regional novel. (Fiction. 9-12)