From Publishers Weekly
Beautiful Angela May lives a rather eccentric life with her mother in a small house at the top of Dry Creek Road. All her life she has heard that she was a child of love, but that her father was married and could not leave his other family. Now she's determined to meet him. Her best friend, Tycho Potter, doesn't think it's a good idea. In many ways he's a romantic and mystical person, but watching his sister's marriage fall apart has made him skeptical about Angela's faith in the power of love. Although things are predictably awful when Angela faces her father, out of this experience comes a new romance with Tycho and a better understanding of herself. This fairly straightforward story is overlaid with metaphysical musings that Angela and Tycho cull from old novels and Ionian philosophy. There are moments of lyrical intensity when the everyday is transformed by this spiritual element, but the two themes do not completely gel.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up Both Angela and Tycho had romantic notions: she about her unknown father, whom her mother had never married, and he for beautiful, sensual Angela. As Angela locates her father and plots a course to make him discover her, she learns that commonsense is a neat, symmetrical, misleading circle whereas truth is slightly elliptical and wobbly. As short, homely, brilliant Tycho contemplates the stars and planets to understand his family problems and hopeless love, Angela's confrontation with her father precipitates the emotional trauma of rejection. Through this turmoil, she recognizes her romantic feelings for Tycho, and the two have their first sexual encounter. Other stories of daughters searching for fathers deal with inner turmoil and search-for-self as here, but Mahy's is unique due to the distinct, unusual personalities; the New Zealand setting; the teenagers' fascination with the components of the universe and Mahy's use of analogies with fresh descriptions conveying sharp, vivid images. This story is brightly lit with perceptions and the universal inscrutability of finding one's place. The occult shivers in previous Mahy books don't occur here, but the atmosphere is electrically charged with the uncommon tone, eccentric characters and meshing of circumstances with feelings that should both appeal to and challenge YA readers and leave them pondering the center of their universe. Julie Cummins, Monroe County Library System, Rochester, N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
