Second Sight - Hardcover

Grade 6-9-A collection of short stories by eight top young adult authors. The selections are largely compelling and reflect all of the uncertainty, dread, and anticipation that surround this momentous milestone. The book opens with "Oswin's Millennium," Avi's haunting tale of an abused stable boy set in the first millennium, and closes with "The Three-Century Woman," Richard Peck's hilarious story of an elderly woman who beats a TV interviewer at his own game. In between, stories by Janet Taylor Lisle, Rita Williams-Garcia, Nancy Springer, and Michael Cadnum examine people's responses to the millennium, while Madeleine L'Engle gives a brief glimpse of the Austin family as it reacts to Rob's belief that a real millennium bug (an enormous beetle) might exist. However, it is Natalie Babbitt who defines the most basic question about the millennium in her story "Tomorrow." Mr. Rummage is convinced that people want to know what will happen tomorrow and he devises numerous ways, including a balloon trip, to try and find out. But it is an old man in the park who gets to the heart of the matter when he says, "Who cares what kind of a day it's going to be? What matters is, if there's even going to be a day." And when the dawn colors streak the sky, both the old man and Mr. Rummage know the truth, and so do readers.
Barbara Scotto, Michael Driscoll School, Brookline, MA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Madeleine L'Engle, Richard Peck and other favorite authors transit eight characters into the 21st century. These stories, mostly slices of realism with a hint of the supernatural, introduce universal teens with familiar conflicts. Not so coincidentally, most protagonists experience epiphanies on or around New Year's Eve. In Janet Taylor Lisle's tale, shortly before a girl rings in the year 2000 in Mexico with her family, she has a run-in with a teenage gang amongst Mayan ruins, which turns into a transformative experience. On the same evening, miles away, in Nancy Springer's selection, Mike plans to spend an uneventful night as disc jockey for a local radio stationAuntil spectators in Times Square claim to have seen Jesus in the sky, and an accident seriously injures both a co-worker and his father. While the millennium theme lurks perhaps too conspicuously in the shadows of many stories, at least two authors manage to gracefully broaden it. Natalie Babbitt's timeless fantasy shows how a father, obsessed with glimpsing tomorrow, goes to absurd lengths to find out what the future has in store. Rita Williams-Garcia's lyrical tale, with its folkloric quality, mourns the loss of age-old traditions as modern concerns obscure the importance of family roots ("Gone is the simple need to shake off the world and be among the familiar"). Ages 10-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.