SECRET HOLES

Ten-year-old narrator Sylvia Freeman is in for some changes in her life. Not only has she just met her father (whom she had been told was deceased), but she has also found out that her “best friend,” hundred-year-old Miz Lula Maye, is also her great-grandmother. Flood does a pretty good job of keeping everything straight for the reader, even when the narrator is deliberately kept in the dark by her mother. When Miz Lula Maye shows Sylvia the contents of the secret holes where she keeps her important documents, the little girl becomes intent on discovering her mother’s secret holes as well. Her curiosity is rewarded, but she finds out much more of what her mother has kept hidden. In a much-too-neat ending, Sylvia learns that everyone loves her, no one is to blame for all the secrets, and no one has to worry about money ever again. Well-meaning, but saccharine. (Fiction. 8-12)