Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. The laughs are most frequent in the beginning, which gets a reader's attention, and the sly, slow build-up to the final black fox episode is as firm as you could ask for.Ī home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature. It's not what he does (see a certain black fox fifteen times, not all included) but how he tells it that makes him such a stand-out, and his digressions (watching an ant on Petie's sneakers, counting hand wrinkles to calculate the day he'll die) are steady, smooth and well-spaced. But he goes ('Control,' his father says) and spends the first two days saying he's 'just fine' and wondering when they'll stop asking. A non-athlete who knows animals come from miles around just to chase him, he deplores the idea of summer on a farm while his parents bicycle through Europe and friend Perle stays at home.

Tommy is not the first hung-up juvenile hero but he is one of the best, and he remembers that summer with Aunt Millie, Uncle Fred and Hazeline with straight-from-the-(skinny)-shoulder sincerity. Other books include The 18th Emergency (1973), The TV Kid (1976), and After the Goat Man (1995).īetsy Byars died on February 26,2020 at the age of 91.A nine-year-old boy with a sense of humor is hard enough to bring to the printed page (or snag in a library), but if you'll latch on to a live one, Betsy Byars has his match. Her book about a 14-year-old girl and her mentally retarded brother, The Summer of the Swans (1970), won the Newberry Award as the most distinguished contribution to children's literature that year. She is author of more than 60 books and has won numerous awards. She is an expert at tapping in to the pain of adolescence, using bits of her own experience to flavor her characters.

While she was in graduate school, she began writing articles for The Saturday Evening Post and Look.īyars writes novels for young people. She graduated from Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Tony dislikes spending the summer on his aunt's farm until he discovers a black fox in the forest and tracks her to her den.īetsy Cromer Byars was born in1928.

The midnight fox