THE SLIGHTLY TRUE STORY OF CEDAR B. HARTLEY (Who Planned to Live an Unusual Life)

Cedar B. Hartley, the 12-year-old narrator of Australian author Murray's promising if uneven debut, takes pride in belonging to a three-person "puddle" on her street: "A puddle isn't just what's left behind, although sometimes you may feel like it is. A puddle of people is full of rich deposits." So Cedar sticks with Caramella Zito, who is 11, extremely shy and chubby, and a "brilliant artist"; and with Ricci, a middle-aged Yugoslavian émigrée who takes Valium and dotes on her dog. Cedar's widowed mom is busy with her job, and Cedar misses her 19-year-old brother, Barnaby, who has run away from boarding school (but sends postcards with quasi-poetic messages). Then Cedar meets Kite, a boy with "the voice of a river." The son of a circus performer, Kite starts teaching Cedar complicated acrobatic feats, and Cedar achieves flexibility and balance both on and off the gymnastics mat. The narrative voice wobbles, and Cedar can sound precocious in places and unconvincingly naïve elsewhere. But at her best, Murray is capable of startling power, as in this description of an epiphany: "You stop knowing how things are. Instead of what you know, there are the patterns that stars make;... the small aching spot where your feet touch the earth... And you've never felt closer to it. You think that if there is an It, you and It are nearly touching." Ages 9-14. (June)