After her parent's divorce, Lily's younger brother, Michael, goes to live with his father. Then, one day Michael calls her from the Baltimore-Washington Airport where their father has abandoned him, and Lily wonders if she will be able to rescue herself from the bitterness and anger she feels. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Starred Review. Cooney's (Whatever Happened to Janie?) latest tale starts with a jolt of adrenaline: an unnamed adult takes Michael to the airport, says something so terrible the boy knows "right away that he must not think about it," and drives off, leaving the youngster without money or an airline ticket. The boy must make his own way back to the New York suburb where, until just a few weeks ago, he lived with his mother, stepfather, two sisters and toddler half-brother. Several pages later Cooney reveals that Michael is just eight years old and the man who abandoned him was his own father, Dennis, who coolly explains, "You're not the son I had in mind." Riding to the rescue is Michael's sister Lily, 15, who manages to get her brother home without any adult help and, when Michael asks her to, promises never to tell what their father did and said. Horrifying though Michael's situation is, this is ultimately Lily's story, one that centers on her heart-splitting struggle to balance her loyalty to Michael's wishes with her fierce desire to reveal the ugly truth about their father. Matters come to a head a year later, when Lily's older sister, determined to have Dennis participate in her upcoming wedding, tries to insist that Lily make peace with their father. Wrathful, courageous, resourceful, loving and even occasionally light-hearted, Lily is a bracingly refreshing heroine. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr 6-8 In this novel's gripping first scene, eight-year-old Michael Rosetti is abandoned by his father at the Baltimore airport, his hopes of living with his dad after his mother's remarriage dashed by the man's self-centeredness and irresponsibility. Placing a collect call to his 15-year-old sister, Lily, Michael waits until she and their baby half brother fly from New York City to get him and return before their mother and stepfather get back from taking their older sister, Reb, to college. Michael swears Lily to secrecy, and Cooney uses this implausible scenario to tell the story of the teenager's growing fury at her father's callousness and its personality-changing effect on her brother. Throughout the book, Lily grapples with her difficulty in reconciling the Christian beliefs and ethics she learns at church and her inability to forgive her father. When Reb returns from college and announces her impending marriage, planning to have her father walk her down the aisle, the story of his cruelty to Michael finally comes out. It is their quiet, forbearing stepfather who comes up with a way to avoid a confrontation between Lily and her father while preserving Reb's and Michael's loyalty to him, however misguided. Despite many flaws, the story is engrossing and the resolution satisfying. Cooney is somewhat heavy-handed in her criticism of school-system counseling, but she manages to avoid religious platitudes, grounding the story in a teenager's conflict with applying her beliefs to a difficult family reality. Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Readers who seek out Cooney's novels for their clever, suspenseful scenarios--as in The Face on the Milk Carton (1990) and its sequels--may be surprised to find that, in her latest, the expected thrills move into an exploration of Christian forgiveness. The book's first section plunges readers into the action: an 8-year-old is abandoned at an airport by his self-absorbed, negligent father, and his 15-year-old sister, Lily, makes a secret airplane journey to retrieve him. The toll that her father's cruelty takes on Lily unfolds in the book's two remaining sections, in which Cooney writes movingly about the dynamics of divorce, the hate that occupied [Lily] like an army, and the sense of cosmic resentment that shakes her relationship with God. Though the psychological and spiritual themes may lose some readers, the promise of a resolution to Lily's anguish will pull at readers (non-Christians included) to the end, where meaty questions about God's obligation to believers, and vice versa, make the book a natural choice for youth ministers to share with teens. JenniferMattson. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.