Summer of the Gypsy Moths by Sara Pennypacker

If you can suspend belief and keep in mind that this is a work of fiction, this is a sweet story with a great hook.  The cover looks sweet - girls on a beach in the sunshine - but what if you were to know that these girls buried their dead foster mother in the back yard without telling anyone? (This is not a horrible spoiler, because this happens within the first few pages of the book.) They lie for weeks, pretending she had broken an ankle as they carried on as if everything was normal. That sounds sinister, but this isn’t a sinister story.


Twelve-year-old Stella has an unreliable mother.  She and her mom had lived with Stella’s grandmother until she died.  Then Stella’s mom abandons her. That’s why she’s in foster care.  But the foster mother was her great aunt (her grandmother’s sister).  Stella likes living with her Aunt Louise, for the most part.  She likes the orderliness of Louise’s home and the predictability of her life there.  She hasn’t quite warmed up to her Aunt’s New Englander reserved nature, but she doesn’t dislike her either.  There is a problem in this orderliness however.  Stella’s Aunt has taken in another foster child, a prickly girl Stella’s age, named Angel.  Angel is an orphan who is “oil to Stella’s water,” as Aunt Louise would say.  But as the girls need each other to keep their terrible secret they begin to see each other in a different light, come to appreciate each other, and maybe become friends.


 
See what happens to Stella and Angel in The Summer of the Gypsy Moths.

Ages 10 and up