The Uninvited by Tim Wynne-Jones (Candlewick, $16.99, 9780763639846/0763639842, 352 pp., ages 14-up, May 2009)
A charming cottage on McAdam's Snye in Canada becomes a crossroads where a young woman who's just completed her freshman year of college and two 20-something guys discover they share something in common in this suspenseful mystery. Wynne-Jones, who proved with his A Thief in the House of Memory that he has a knack for endowing a setting with all of the attributes of a living, breathing character, outdoes himself here. Mimi Shapiro, a lifelong New Yorker, is seeking reprieve and refuge from a relationship-run-amok (with a college professor) when she arrives at the cottage, which belongs to her "hardly the world's most reliable" father. Although the man hasn't been to the cottage in 20 years, it looks to Mimi as though someone else has been there recently. Very recently. In fact, the locks have been changed, and as she goes for Plan B, a male close to her age stops her-- Jackson "Jay" Page. It turns out that Mimi's father had another family here on the snye ("a side channel that bypasses a falls or rapids and rejoins the river downstream, creating an island"), before he met Mimi's mother. But someone else has been breaking in and leaving little "presents" for Jay (a dead bluebird on the table, a snakeskin on his pillow), and the interloper soon begins messing with Mimi's things, too. The mystery of why her father has kept from her the information about Jay's existence takes a backseat to Mimi's own journey as she begins to bond with her half-brother and to stand up for herself in the face of these strange occurrences at their father's cottage. Wynne-Jones plants some tantalizing red herrings, and the plot will keep teens turning pages, but the author's greatest feat is in the development of these three characters and their connection to each other. By shifting among the trio's points of view, the author explores how circumstances can shape the best and worst of us, and nothing is as simple as it first appears.--Jennifer M. Brown
