cover image Alice Dodd and the Spirit of Truth

Alice Dodd and the Spirit of Truth

Catherine Frey Murphy. MacMillan Publishing Company, $14.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-02-767702-7

Despite a plot loaded with chestnuts, Murphy's first novel shows promise. Alice, the 12-year-old narrator, thinks she's ``very medium,'' not a school star like her older brother and not gifted like her Aunt Kate the artist, with whom she's spending the summer at the family cabin. Feeling inadequate, Alice fibs to Kate about having won a school art prize, but the quickly told lie becomes difficult to live with. Various deceptions snowball until Alice is almost overwhelmed. Stock characters abound, from two eccentric maiden sisters who have just moved back to their own family home and the cute-as-a-button three-year-old whom Alice is supposed to baby-sit, to the omniscient grandfather able to guide Alice to inner peace. Even Alice herself, so thoroughly preoccupied with lacking talent, verges on stereotypical. Murphy gives her some depth by having her refer to specific past experiences in descriptive asides--for example, she relates how her grandmother taught her to make a mouthwatering blueberry pie, how she and her older brother used to pretend to be Seneca Indians when they played in the woods. These flashes of talent may not endear this novel to its target audience, but they do mark Murphy as someone to watch. Ages 8-12. (May)