Flightsend

Set in an English village, this novel has the feel of an earlier time (it was first published in the U.K. in 1999). Charlie has just moved with her mother, Kathy, to a neglected 150-year-old country cottage, Flightsend, where they hope for a new start after Kathy’s miscarriage. Descriptive passages of riotous plant life permeate many scenes (“and now here were the aconites, floating like golden lilies on the dark soil”). Kathy’s newfound optimism, apparently partly fueled by medication, is juxtaposed with Charlie’s anxieties about her social life, though, for 16, she is remarkably supportive and nurturing, so little tension is created. Instead, Newbery’s (At the Firefly Gate ) story wanders through a series of benign events, such as the arrival of a handsome German pilot who gives meaning to the name of the cottage and eventually becomes Kathy’s beau. Charlie finds herself drawn to and attracting attention from her lecherous art teacher, and she longs for another man as well—her mother’s ex-boyfriend. Yet these potentially dangerous entanglements are, like the vegetation, eventually tamed. The result is a pleasing, quiet coming-of-age story. Ages 12–up. (Jan.)