Alice Hoffman – *NightBird* Sings a Beautiful Tune

A bright 12-year-old narrator, Twig Fowler, is good at keeping secrets, and in Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, Twig struggles with not only family secrets but a feeling that she will always be the invisible child.  Her mother lives a quiet life, drawing very little attention to the family, but it was not always that way.  Twig does not know how to answer questions about her family’s past, either about her mysteriously-disappeared father nor about her former life in New York City.  When the monster of Twig’s town, Sidwell, seems to be afoot, the story gets exciting, even more so when descendants of the witch Agnes Early move in next door.  Add to that more mystery: the legend of the monster of Sidwell, Twig’s family’s curse, someone or something (the Monster of Sidwell?) leaving strange graffiti all over town and in the local woods, and it just gets better and better. Twig becomes part-time investigator and part-time problem-solver – all along while hoping to make some new friends and overcome her family’s lifestyle of seclusion.  Alice Hoffmann’s narrator can match her wits and her feelings right alongside many of Hoffmann’s other characters – she’s an acutely empathetic narrator, and she asks questions that most pre-adolescents ask at one time or another about how the world works, what is valuable in people and in nature, and how people know what they know.  The mysteries of the novel’s story make the magic of being a teenager in summer break as curious and entertaining as the magic of dark woods, monsters, and witches of a dark Massachusetts night.  Especially charming are the connections that the young almost-invisible Twig makes with the elderly folks in her town, when, as adolescents know all too well, sometimes the most ignored people tend to have the most important and interesting stories to tell.