The Woman in the Wall

August 31, 1998
An agoraphobic seven-year-old girl retreats into secret passages she has built in her house until her family nearly forgets her. PW said, "Kindle follows her magical Owl in Love with a novel featuring an equally gripping premise." Ages 10-14.

March 3, 1997
Kindl follows her magical Owl in Love with a novel featuring an equally gripping premise. A metaphorical study of an agoraphobic child, it opens with a series of emotional, surreal images-but eventually degenerates into trite teen romance and platitudes about sheltering the "frightened child-self." Living with her sensitive mother and boisterous sisters in an enormous old house, Anna imitates her absentee father by fading out of her family's life. Painfully shy, "with a face like a glass of water," she is so small and transparent her sisters sit on her by mistake. When her mother threatens to send her to school, Anna-who has preternatural skills with power tools and sewing needles-retreats permanently into the walls of the house, where she builds a maze of secret, undersize rooms and passages. Next met in adolescence, she develops a crush on a visitor to the house and exchanges letters with him without revealing her identity (he thinks he's corresponding with her beautiful older sister). The action culminates with Anna attending a Halloween party, where she incurs her older sister's wrath and triggers a chase scene that lacks the energy to be either slapstick or dramatic. In the process, Anna realizes she is attractive and decides to reenter the world. The resonant originality of the first few chapters is undermined by the conventional conflicts and resolution. Ages 10-14.

April 1, 1997
Gr 5-8-Exceedingly shy Anna, 14, narrates her life story. When she is seven, her mother tells her she must go to school. The school psychologist arrives at the run-down family mansion only to mistake Anna for a doll and somehow ends up with her in her purse. This is enough to impel the child to hide in a secret room she has readied overnight by putting up a false wall in the family library. Over the years, she adds new rooms, passages, a kitchen, peepholes; and no one notices. Although she continues repairing, baking, and sewing as her family requests, gradually her mother and older sister, Andrea, choose to forget her. When one of Andrea's ignored admirers sticks a love letter addressed to "A" into a crack in the stairs, Anna answers it, thus setting in motion a chain of events that lead to her discovery. This story cannot make up its mind what it wants to be. It could be fantasy. Rooms diminish and disappear. No one pays much attention to this engineering prodigy scurrying through the walls for seven years. Yet Kindl's messy ruminations on puberty drag the story kicking and screaming back to realism. At any rate, it is a disturbing novel. Anna's mother's casual acceptance of her daughter's self-imposed isolation will be unsettling to many children, and readers are not privy to the woman's explanation of the sudden appearance of a third daughter to her soon-to-be husband. The author's shrill Victorian trill pushes the story in a gothic direction. For a more palatable offering on shyness delivered with a hint of Victorian flavor, try Jean Ure's The Children Next Door (Scholastic, 1996).-Cindy Darling Codell, Clark Middle School, Winchester, KY

March 15, 1997
Gr. 7^-10. Anyone who has ever felt like fading into the woodwork will enjoy this story about the withdrawal of an extremely shy child who retreats behind the walls of her family's large, dilapidated house and lives alone in her secret rooms until she is 14 years old. Then, lured by her attraction for a klutzy young man and terrified that her mother is about to sell the house, Anna finally comes out and faces the world. She is like a beautiful moth emerging from a cocoon, and the metaphor is spelled out: she is too large now for the narrow passageways of childhood. Just as Anna lives on the margins of the house, so this contemporary story is just on the edge of the surreal. The trouble is that Anna keeps insisting on explaining the facts in detail, so you can't help wondering about them. Where exactly does the child live? How does she know so much? And why does her mother give up looking for her? What makes you suspend disbelief is the authority of Anna's quirky, vulnerable narrative voice, which pulls you into a touching, dreamy story told with tender comedy. ((Reviewed March 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)