The Green Man

Bedard’s lyrical ghost story with a literary leitmotif features an adult character first introduced as a child in A Darker Magic (1987). A mildly famous poet, oddball Emily owns a languishing bookstore, the Green Man. When Emily’s niece, 15-year-old O (don’t call her Ophelia), comes to spend the summer with Aunt Emily, O, herself a fledgling poet, realizes that her aunt is haunted by the memory of a monstrous, Svengali-like stage magician whose magic seems dangerously real and who has left a trail of death behind him. Most of the apparitions in the bookstore, however, are innocuous, poetic types like “Mallarmé [who] sat hunched on the stairs, his plaid shawl draped over his shoulders, his pen poised over a scrap of closely written manuscript on his knees,” or the elusive Emily Dickinson. Complicating matters for O is a mysterious and seductive young man who calls himself Rimbaud, but who may not be human. Though Bedard’s somewhat old-fashioned story has a loosely knit plot, it is propelled by two well-realized viewpoint characters and offers an atmospheric tribute to the power of poetry. Ages 10–14. (Apr.)