Early on in The Swallowtail Legacy: Wreck at Ada's Reef, 12-year-old narrator Lark thinks, "I still haven't wrapped my head around the idea that the Roost actually belongs to Pip and me.... It sounds like something from an old novel." Michael D. Beil's delightful middle-grade mystery is itself like an old novel: unhurriedly paced, impeccably written and including many orphaned children.
Lark and her sister, Pip, are spending the summer on Lake Erie's Swallowtail Island with their family, or what's left of it: their father is long dead, and their mother, from whom they inherited a house on the island, died three months earlier in Connecticut, where the sisters live with their stepfather and his three motherless sons. On the island the family connects with Lark's mother's oldest friend, journalist Nadine Pritchard, who is writing a book about the mysterious speedboat crash at Swallowtail that killed her grandfather 75 years earlier. Lark becomes Nadine's assistant--a welcome diversion for a hotheaded tween who's working through "my 'issues.' "
Beil (Red Blazer Girls series) has crafted a race-against-the-clock mystery with the signposts of a classic crime caper (a missing will, a curious old painting), but the book isn't a total throwback: homophobia influences a key plot point, and Lark emerges as something of a junior action hero. While The Swallowtail Legacy abounds with references to literary classics, it favorably evokes a modern counterpart: Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks, with its likewise widowed eggheaded father, sprawl of siblings and pets and salvific summer getaway. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author