By Corey Ann Haydu
Four sisters spend the summer in an old lake house where the closets open into worlds that hand them exactly what they want, which turns out to be the most dangerous thing about them.
Silly is eleven, her real name is Priscilla, and she's the youngest of four. The family has come to the old lake house for the summer because a change of scenery is supposed to help, and it isn't helping. Their mom's moods arrive like weather, and she's drinking. Their dad copes by announcing that everything is fine. Silly's sisters, Astrid and Eleanor and Marla, have a secret they won't let her in on, and when she finally gets in, here it is: the closets in the house open into worlds. Beautiful ones, with stars you can pick up and put in your pocket. The four of them start going in and staying longer, because inside a closet nobody is downstairs. Then the closets start wanting something back, and one of the sisters doesn't come out.
This is the book about escaping, and it's the only one on the shelf willing to admit that escaping works. The closets are wonderful, and Haydu means them to be. She's writing about what it's like to have somewhere to go that beats your own kitchen, and how the going gets harder to come back from. And she does it as real fantasy, not a metaphor with a bow on it. The story is built on the bones of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. It's the heaviest of the shelf in temperament, and it may land hardest with an older child who has gone quiet at home and started disappearing into something instead, a screen, a book, a friend's house. It takes that kind of coping seriously.