cover image HARMONY

HARMONY

Rita Murphy, . . Delacorte, $15.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-385-72938-3

As in her debut novel, Night Flying, Murphy connects earth and sky in a novel laced with lyricism and magic. On an August evening during the Perseid meteor showers, an infant bursts through the roof of Felix McGuillicuddy and Nettie Mae McClean's chicken coop. Narrator Harmony, 14, recounts the incident of her unusual arrival, and her magnetic voice intertwines realism with a sense of possibility: "Nettie Mae has had Rhode Island Reds and Black Austrolorps in that coop, but she'd never had a star before." Their home in the Hamlin Mountains, in the northeast corner of Tennessee, seems ringed with a benevolent supernatural quality: Nettie Mae, whose mother was Cherokee, is the healer on the mountain, and the Old People, a row of white pines ("ten feet wide and a hundred feet tall") sacred to the tribe, have been left in Nettie Mae's care. When the Great Northern Lumber Company threatens to cut down the Old People, Harmony discovers she possesses magical powers that she can only attribute to her heavenly birthright, and they come in handy in an eclectic array of situations. Murphy offers readers a palpable sense of place so that readers can almost feel the Old People sway in the breeze or hear the cry of a coyote pup caught in a trap; with just a few scenes, she creates a supporting cast of full-blooded, eccentric mountain people—even the most crotchety of the bunch will earn readers' sympathy. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)