The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry (Houghton/Lorraine, $16, 9780618979745/0618979743, 176 pp., ages 9-13, March)
Fans of two-time Newbery Medalist Lowry (Number the Stars; The Giver) will easily detect the fun she's having with this novel about "an old-fashioned type of family." With tongue planted firmly in cheek, her omniscient narrator sends up classic orphan tales such as Heidi and The Secret Garden, and makes a couple of references to one of Dickens' only non-orphan novels, A Christmas Carol (yet points out, "A boy named Tim is not an orphan but behaves like one"). Intermediaries beware: this may be a tricky one to booktalk or handsell. In the first two chapters, the four Willoughby children devise ways to get rid of the parents, even as the "impatient and irascible" father and "indolent and ill-tempered" mother ("Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives") dream up plans to dispense with their progeny. For their part, the quartet of Willoughby offspring also starts off rather unsympathetically; after someone leaves a baby on their doorstep (à la The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May), the children abandon it on the porch of the local millionaire, whose own small son was presumed dead in a train wreck in the Alps six years before. The plot purposefully follows a predictable trajectory, beginning with a kind nanny who redeems the children ("Not one bit like that fly-by-night [Mary Poppins] . . . It almost gives me diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!" says Nanny), and concluding with the parents meeting a tragic end (though not at the hands of their children). Laugh-out-loud scenes feature the 10-year-old twins, both named Barnaby, who must share a sweater because their mother will knit only one, and the children posing as a coat rack or sporting a lampshade (bearing this note, "The electricity in this house is defective and may electrocute you if you turn on a lamp") in order to scare off prospective homebuyers. The bonus: a closing glossary as witty as the text (e.g., "Tycoon means somebody who has amassed great wealth and power in business. Usually a tycoon is a man, for some reason. Maybe Oprah Winfrey is a tycooness"). Avid booklovers will most appreciate Lowry's handiwork, but reluctant readers may well be drawn in by this deliciously irreverent narrator.--Jennifer M. Brown
