However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. Thoughtful, entertaining fare for the middle grades.Ī paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere. Hahn uses her satisfyingly mysterious, spooky story to illuminate the interaction of people in the present: Ashley's abduction of the doll not only parallels the earlier one but is a manifestation of her unresolved grief moreover, it is because Mom and Ashley have a healthy, loving relationship that each has tried to protect the other by keeping her grief to herself the incident with the doll is the catalyst that causes them finally to confide in each other. Carrie proves to be Miss Cooper, who-with the girls' help-is finally able to return the doll to her dear friend.
Then the cat takes her next door, where she meets Louisa-a child who died of consumption in 1912-and learns that "Carrie" borrowed her beloved doll but never returned it. To her own surprise, Ashley feels compelled to take the doll for herself, hiding it from Kristi.
Despite Miss Cooper's unreasonable restrictions on her every move, Ashley manages to make friends with Kristi, a younger child next door together, they explore the forbidden, overgrown garden and discover an old doll that is buried there. Ashley and her newly widowed mother have just moved into Miss Cooper's upstairs apartment so that Mom can complete her dissertation. So does the doll's original owner, a girl who died decades ago, but whom Ashley meets when she follows a mysterious white cat through a hedge.A ghost cat leads ten-year-old Ashley through a hedge-and back to the time when her fiercely disagreeable old landlady was an unhappy child who committed a wrong she still regrets. Ashley wants to keep the doll for herself, but Kristi has other ideas. When Ashley makes friends with the girl next door, Kristi, they uncover a wooden box containing a well-loved turn-of-the-century doll.
Ashley and her mother need their new apartment to work out, but everything Ashley does seems to upset the irritable and unforgiving landlady. From ghost story master Mary Downing Hahn, the haunting tale of a mysterious doll discovered in a young girl's garden, and its owner, a girl from seventy years in the past, who wants it back.Ī suspenseful story of unexpected connections between present and past.
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