PRIVATE LILLY

Lily, who is six, her brother Casey, twelve, and their mother have moved from a house in New Jersey to a small apartment in Philadelphia. Casey has a space of his own, while Lily has to share a room with her mother. Seeking privacy, Lily attempts to sleep in the bathtub with the chair cushions, but the faucet leaks and the cushions get wet; she then tries to make a cave under the kitchen table that lasts only until a spider takes a walk across her face. Sleeping in the closet doesn’t work out much better. Casey provides the solution when he spots a folding screen in a used-furniture store, which the family refurbishes to Lily’s satisfaction. Warner keeps the tone light and the focus tight, so readers only know that the family’s reduced circumstances are because a “mean judge” has sent Lily’s father to jail for “taking stuff that wasn’t his.” In true six-year-old form, Lily’s attention is on the problem of privacy, and while a one-chapter predicament has been spun into a novel, the childlike first-person narration is written with considerable humor and grace. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 7-9)