From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 7-10–Six years ago, when Declan Steeple was 10 and his sister was just a baby, his mother, Lindy, disappeared, searching for something better than the dusty family estate with its generations of clutter and memory. Now the Steeples live in a modern split-level down the hill from the Big House, but the mansion is still there, filled with a past that hides secrets. When a local man is found dead in the house, memories of Lindy and her unhappiness living there suddenly become a pressing weight on Dec, compounded by the fact that he and his sister were the ones to discover the body. The teen feels lost and suspicious; his father seems to be hiding something and Dec realizes how much has never been discussed. This is a beautifully written novel, slim and surprising but ultimately satisfying. Declan's vivid memories and conversations with his father and his friend Ezra bring the pain of his abandonment, and the strength of his determination to move on, vividly to life. Declan's other friends, especially the creative and quirky Viv, appear only briefly but have enough character to bring them to life and to illuminate the protagonist. The dreams and memories that haunt Declan sometimes seem almost fantastic, but overall this is a realistic and moving story. Given that it focuses on an internal journey, this rich and rewarding novel will appeal most to thoughtful readers who appreciate a sad and bittersweet read.–Karyn N. Silverman, Elizabeth Irwin High School, New York City
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. Whenever 16-year-old Dec visits the house where his family lived before his mother's disappearance six years earlier, he slips into long-forgotten scenes that he had shared with her during his childhood. Drawn with a skilled hand, the protagonist is placed in a memorable eastern Ontario setting, where Dec's ancestral family home is preserved, museum-like, near his current house. The violent death of a man who breaks into the old house sets in motion a series of mysteries and revelations that drive Dec to remember things about his mother and try to learn the rest from her best friend and from his father, who guard their secrets well. Vividly written, the narrative conveys a strong sense of Dec's uneasiness, as past and present overlap in an unsettling way. The final revelations about his mother seem almost anticlimactic, as Dec has already developed a sure sense of who he is and where he is headed. An original coming-of-age story from the author of The Maestro (1996). Carolyn Phelan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
All the ingredients for what may well be a gothic murder mystery are in place in this page-turner for young adults by two-time G-G winner, Tim Wynne-Jones: the body that is found in the abandoned, ancestral mansion; the persistent suspicions that a murder took place; and the surprising twists as the reader nears the end. Tim Wynne-Jones, however, eschews the murder mystery formula in order to achieve something entirely different, a novel of suspense that examines memory as a central theme in the shaping of experience.
Declan Steeple is a bright16-year old whose memories of his absent mother return to him as vivid re-creations of his childhood past. He longs to find the truth about his missing mother who abandoned the family when he was ten. Did she really leave, as his father claims, and why? Is she alive and, if so, where is she?
When Declan and his 6-year-old sister discover the body of a would-be thief in the estate known as Steeple Hall, his mother’s character and her tattered past become intertwined with his attempt to solve both the puzzle of her disappearance and the death of the burglar. His father, Bernard, sole inheritor of the Steeple fortune and committed to preserving the past as it is, stifles his attempts.
Steeple Hall, the ancestral home for generations of the Steeple family, is the book’s House of Memory. It evokes comparisons, as one of Declan’s classmates says, to Poe’s House of Usher. After Declan’s mother leaves the family, his father builds a smaller, more modest house down the hill from the mansion for his children and Birdie, their new “mother.” However, Steeple Hall is not entirely abandoned by them. It is lovingly maintained by Bernard (whose passion for history has him building a scale model replica of the Canadians landing at Juno Beach on D-Day) as a museum to the Steeple name, a place to store the past. For Declan the old mansion is also a link to the past and he makes regular visits to his former home and bedroom in order to relive memories of his mother.
With the help of Ezra, a school friend who serves as a foil for his ideas and suspicions, Declan discovers that his mother’s past is as tainted as Bernard and Birdie’s coverup of the truth. In the House of Memory he learns that “the past is what happens when the present has no future in it.” He also realizes by the end of the novel that when one world ends, there’s another one about to begin. The ambiguity of who really is the thief in the House of Memory deepens as the story unfolds. Figuratively, there are several. And inasmuch as the house is a memory-maker for Declan, helping to reconstruct his mother’s past, it also liberates the truth that makes the present bearable for everyone at Steeple Hall.
Such is the writing skill of Tim Wynne-Jones that an adolescent reader will recognize in A Thief in the House of Memory that a good story, a story that hums with the dynamics of human relationships, gets told through character and theme as much as it reveals itself through a well-constructed plot. That same reader will also appreciate the fast-paced, sturdy writing of an author who paints his scenes with images equally as well as he furnishes his House of Memory with ideas worth thinking about.
Antony Di Nardo (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Declan Steeple is a bright16-year old whose memories of his absent mother return to him as vivid re-creations of his childhood past. He longs to find the truth about his missing mother who abandoned the family when he was ten. Did she really leave, as his father claims, and why? Is she alive and, if so, where is she?
When Declan and his 6-year-old sister discover the body of a would-be thief in the estate known as Steeple Hall, his mother’s character and her tattered past become intertwined with his attempt to solve both the puzzle of her disappearance and the death of the burglar. His father, Bernard, sole inheritor of the Steeple fortune and committed to preserving the past as it is, stifles his attempts.
Steeple Hall, the ancestral home for generations of the Steeple family, is the book’s House of Memory. It evokes comparisons, as one of Declan’s classmates says, to Poe’s House of Usher. After Declan’s mother leaves the family, his father builds a smaller, more modest house down the hill from the mansion for his children and Birdie, their new “mother.” However, Steeple Hall is not entirely abandoned by them. It is lovingly maintained by Bernard (whose passion for history has him building a scale model replica of the Canadians landing at Juno Beach on D-Day) as a museum to the Steeple name, a place to store the past. For Declan the old mansion is also a link to the past and he makes regular visits to his former home and bedroom in order to relive memories of his mother.
With the help of Ezra, a school friend who serves as a foil for his ideas and suspicions, Declan discovers that his mother’s past is as tainted as Bernard and Birdie’s coverup of the truth. In the House of Memory he learns that “the past is what happens when the present has no future in it.” He also realizes by the end of the novel that when one world ends, there’s another one about to begin. The ambiguity of who really is the thief in the House of Memory deepens as the story unfolds. Figuratively, there are several. And inasmuch as the house is a memory-maker for Declan, helping to reconstruct his mother’s past, it also liberates the truth that makes the present bearable for everyone at Steeple Hall.
Such is the writing skill of Tim Wynne-Jones that an adolescent reader will recognize in A Thief in the House of Memory that a good story, a story that hums with the dynamics of human relationships, gets told through character and theme as much as it reveals itself through a well-constructed plot. That same reader will also appreciate the fast-paced, sturdy writing of an author who paints his scenes with images equally as well as he furnishes his House of Memory with ideas worth thinking about.
Antony Di Nardo (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
Declan Steeple is a sixteen-year-old who has it all, or so it would seem. Great grades, dreams of becoming an architect, a loyal and wise best friend, a pack of uncommonly brilliant classmates at school, an adoring little sister, a stepmother who keeps her distance, and an independently wealthy father. Then one day Dec hitches a ride home from school with the driver of a water-haulage truck, setting in motion a chain of events that exposes the not-so-perfect underbelly of his perfect life.
It began when he was ten, the day his mother, Lindy, suddenly left home. In the past six years Dec hasn’t thought about her much, nor about why his reclusive father has turned the family mansion into a kind of museum -- the House of Memory. They don’t live there anymore. Less than a year after Lindy left, his father built a modern house on the same property and began a new life with Lindy's best friend, Birdy. Dec has always been mildly embarrassed and puzzled by the Old House. The hitchhiking incident changes all that. It leads not only to a gruesome death, but also unleashes a flood of memories of Dec’s beloved mother. And in coming to terms with her leaving, he must face some difficult questions. What really happened? Who is to blame? And what happens now? In this brilliant new novel, Tim Wynne-Jones turns his hand to the fictional territory he knows best -- the prickly ties that bind families, the murky and fertile ground that connects imagination and real life, and the liberating, healing power of good friends. All told, as always, with wit, compassion and humour.
About the Author
Tim Wynne-Jones is the author of twenty-four books for adults and children. He has won the Governor General's Award for children's literature twice -- in 1993 for his collection of short stories, Some of the Kinder Planets, and in 1995 for his novel, The Maestro. He has also won the Canadian Library Association Book Award four times. His work has been translated into Dutch, Danish, German, French, Italian, Catalan, Japanese and Korean. Tim’s last novel, The Boy in the Burning House, won the Arthur Ellis Award of the Crime Writers of Canada, and the Edgar Trophy of the Mystery Writers of America as the best mystery story of the year for young adults. It also won the Insula Romana Prize in Umbra, Italy, as the YA novel of the year. Tim lives with his wife, Amanda Lewis, and their youngest child on 76 acres of bush land near Perth, Ontario. Two older children live in Toronto and London, England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From A Thief in the House of Memory:
They rounded the final curve and the big house sprang fully into view. Light glinted off the glass of the conservatory. The newly budding maples shhhhhed in the breeze. There was always wind up here.
Steeple Hall. The words were carved in stone above the entranceway with a shamrock on either side. Sunny broke into a run. Her yellow boots made galumphing noise on the wide stone pathway.
She waited for him by the door, wiggling like a puppy back from a walk. Dec dug out the long brass key. The tumblers turned. Sunny pushed open the door.
He smelled it before he saw it, a disturbing scent on the dry, old air. The frosted-glass vestibule door was slightly ajar. Sunny slithered out of her boots, pushed open the door, and stopped dead.
"Uh-oh," she said.
A glass-paneled bookcase had fallen. The spacious front hallway was lined on the eastern wall with bookcases, ten feet tall and the three feet wide. One of those cases lay before them. Books were strewn everywhere. A bronze bust of Plato lay at Sunny's feet. She stepped back into her brother's arms.
Then they saw the hand.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
They rounded the final curve and the big house sprang fully into view. Light glinted off the glass of the conservatory. The newly budding maples shhhhhed in the breeze. There was always wind up here.
Steeple Hall. The words were carved in stone above the entranceway with a shamrock on either side. Sunny broke into a run. Her yellow boots made galumphing noise on the wide stone pathway.
She waited for him by the door, wiggling like a puppy back from a walk. Dec dug out the long brass key. The tumblers turned. Sunny pushed open the door.
He smelled it before he saw it, a disturbing scent on the dry, old air. The frosted-glass vestibule door was slightly ajar. Sunny slithered out of her boots, pushed open the door, and stopped dead.
"Uh-oh," she said.
A glass-paneled bookcase had fallen. The spacious front hallway was lined on the eastern wall with bookcases, ten feet tall and the three feet wide. One of those cases lay before them. Books were strewn everywhere. A bronze bust of Plato lay at Sunny's feet. She stepped back into her brother's arms.
Then they saw the hand.
