Dot to Dot

In Bakke's (Miss Alcott's E-mail) second book, her first for teens, the life of 12-year-old Dorothy Mary-Jane (aka Dot) is altered after her mother is hit by a truck and killed. Dot is left afraid of things connected to the accident%E2%80%94libraries, traffic, the color red. Her bossy and determined Aunt Tab swoops in and insists they take a trip to England to scatter Dot's mother's ashes and research Dot's namesakes: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Dorothy Wordsworth. When Dot meets the ghosts of these writers, she learns, through their conversations and novels, that she is not as alone as she believed. Bakke faces Dot's pain head-on ("[I]t's hard to care about three women who'd been dead for two hundred years when your own mother has been dead less than two months and you weren't too sure about the point of staying alive yourself"), and the shifting relationship between Dot and her aunt, as well as Dot's tender memories of her mother, are especially well done. With complex characters and eloquent prose, it's an absorbing story of a girl's surprising path through her grief. Ages 12%E2%80%93up.