Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the feature in which we give a wrinkled look at the YA books we loved as youth. Today, Lizzie Skurnick rereads Down A Dark Hall, Lois Duncan's thriller about a residence where artists can really colonize.

They had been driving since dawn, and for the past two hours, since they had turned off the highway onto the winding road that led through hill country, Kit Gordy had been sleeping.

Oh, Lois. Was it a particularly impatient agent? An editor enforcing a deadline? Simply way too many assignments at once? Because, as taxing and unbearable as the life of a writer is, I am still wildly curious to know what last straw made you leave off your mastery of plain old brainwashing and body-stealing to rework that trope as a new vision of the muse: a jostling crowd of nasty artist ghosts ready to snatch the pen from your hand and steal your brain outright.

Before we begin, I have to confess that, last night, in the rain-wracked silence of my apartment, I was so scared of this book I had to stop reading. I mean, I literally stopped reading and threw the book down and was like, maybe it's time for some Glimpses of the Moon before bed. Then I got up and checked all the windows and doors, and I decided I would leave off my customary car alarm-blocking ear plugs because if a malevolent ghost were to sneak in, it would be good to have a jump on her, especially if the icy freezing cold that customarily heralds a spectral presence were to get offset by my duvet.

Because, to put a question I have considered for decades straight to you...what is it that makes Duncan so terrifying? Is it her stubborn refusal to use contractions? ("I will not talk to them, she told herself. I have nothing to say to them.") Is it the mildly panicked onslaught of em-dashes? ("'I'll never be at home here!' Kit cried. 'Can't you feel it, Mom? There's something about this place—something—'") Or maybe it has something to do with this type of thing:

She could not find the word she was seeking, and so she fell silent as the house grew nearer and nearer and then was upon them....And then Kit knew the word for which she had been searching. The word was "evil."

In any case. Down a Dark Hall is the TERRIFYING, UNBEARABLY FEAR-INDUCING story of one Kit Gordy—likable, pleasant and square-jawed—who, when we encounter her, is in the process of being deposited at the extremely selective Blackwood boarding school for girls, the better for her new stepfather to privately enjoy her mother's company on a months-long European honeymoon. (Ubiquitous Duncian enraging assertion of unearned authority by a male interloper: Kit: "I still don't see why I couldn't go to Europe with you and Dan...I'm fourteen and can look after myself." Dan: "No more, now. You're upsetting your mother.")

She is joined shortly not by a throng but by only three other students: the quiet Sandra Mason (sprinkle of freckles, elfin face), bubbly Lynda Hannah (pretty, dumb), and the stolidly bright Ruth Stark (downy shadow across her upper lip, Daughters of Eve Irene's progenitor?). Rounding out the crew are headmistress Madam Duret, French, imperious and eye-boring (is there any other kind?), her handsome, delicate son Jules, and the totally creepy Professor Farley, who is the type of character who hangs around simply to deliver terrifying philosophical pronouncements once a crisis has come to a head. ("If nothing comes from this experience but one short poem by one of the immortal poets of history, it will be worth more than the lives of four commonplace youngers.")

Getting ahead of myself! The girls' first days at Blackwood are as normal as they can be, at least for ones spent in an institution in which students are placed in velvet-canopied beds in rooms that only lock from the outside. But when Lynda, a heretofore unremarkable student (Ruth's generous verdict: "The day they delivered brains, Lynda was out to lunch") produces a masterful sketch of Kit, things begin to go awry. Sandra, visited by a gentle woman she calls Ellis, starts to produce reams of beauteous (if slightly outdated) poetry. Ruth finds herself jotting down equations that surpass even her 150-IQ comprehension, while Kit, dreaming of delicate piano melodies every night, awakens still-fatigued, with suspiciously achy fingers.

Spoiler. Yes! Yes! They are being possessed by the ghosts of artists past! Even more awesome, they are possessed by famous ghosts of the past: for Sandra, one Emily Bronte; for Kit, Franz Schubert; for Lynda, the painter Thomas Cole; and for Ruth, all the great mathematicians of all time. (Who could even name one dead mathematician?) Once Ruth figures out that they all have ESP (Ruth can read people's minds; Kit and Sandra have been visited by their dead parents; Lynda remembers a former life under Queen Victoria), it is only a hop, spook and a jump to the realization that, not only do Madam Duret and Professor Farley know that the girls are producing great works of art from the beyond, they're willing to sacrifice them to the venture entirely. (See above: "lives of four commonplace youngsters.")

For those of you who have not yet read the work, I will not ruin the Turn of the Screw-cum-Girls of Canby Hall enjoyment beyond what I already have. (Pretty much totally.) But upon my reread (sorry, must ruin further), I found it telling that the crisis occurs not because the ghosts want to come back from the dead or something—but simply because the ghosts' art becomes, in all senses, bad.

Duncan may have been a bit wearied by the demands of the muse, but just as body-snatching, in Stranger With My Face, is a vehicle to discuss the true nature of family, here, Duncan here uses body-snatching to discuss the cost of personal liberty.

Witness Kit's confrontation of the wimpy Jules, defending his mother's scheme:

"My mother has a gift, a marvelous one. She's given you a chance to help enrich the world. Why do you find that so upsetting?"

"Why do I find it upsetting!" Kit regarded him incredulously. "How would you feel, being used as a kind of vehicle for dead people!"

After all, it's not only Madame Duret and Professor Farley who are perfectly happy to sacrifice Kit's life for their own goals. It's also her mother and new stepfather, who are gently insistent that she enjoy the life they've planned for her, her own feelings be damned. But despite this, Kit, arriving at Blackwood, knows her own identity matters too.

Looking at herself in her new room's creepy mirror, she thinks the following:

"Who am I?" the eyes asked. "What is my place in the world? Am I pretty? Do people like me? Does Jules like me? In what direction am I going? Will I accomplish anything worthwhile in my lifetime? Will I be happy? Am I worth loving?"

Lynda's portrait of Kit is valuable, to be sure. But what Down a Dark Hall reminds us is that it doesn't matter what pictures other people create for us. It's everybody's job—and right—to draw that picture for themselves.

Down A Dark Hall [Amazon]

Previous 'Fine Lines' Posts [Tag Page]

• • • • •

Yay! Okay, first, thanks to Lisa G. for the picture above. Second, I'm finally going to stop being a slug and announce last week's Plotfinder winners, as well as the winners from two weeks ago.

From last week's NFIFG, the winners are:

1. Emailer Ariana U., for Invisible Lissa, by Natalie Honeycutt. Actually, officially Hortense won this. But can employees WIN Jezebel contests? I do not know. Hortense, you may have a copy too.

2. Commenter AdelaideDinosaur, BY A HAIR, for Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

And from AYTGIMM, the winners are:

1. Emailer Laura A for Kelly & Me/Adeline Street, by Caroline Lynch Williams.

2. Commenter southernbitch for Why Me?, By Deborah Kent.

3. Commenter HielanLass for A Deadly Game of Magic, by Joan Lowery Nixon.

If you won, congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your address, and I will dispatch your galley of Shelf Discovery immediately!

This week's Plotfinder comes from Amy G., and I LUVS Witch's Sister too:

This is a horror/mystery YA novel involving a family who either rents a vacation home in the woods for the summer or moves there permanently. The main character is a teenage girl who's creeped out by the house and has visions of something horrible that happened there in the past. There's a small town full of muttering townfolk; a cute stable boy she has a flirtation with; and, most uniquely, a creepy nursery rhyme that goes something like "blood-red roses, rose-red blood" that only the heroine heres. There's the definite suggestion that the heroine's burgeoning sexuality connects her with a grizzly axe murder (or something of that nature), and she may even get possessed by the killer at some point.

I realize it's a pretty generic plot, but the "blood-red roses" thing is pretty distinctive, and I've had no luck on Google. (Though Google did help me find "Witch's Sister" and "Spider Doll", some other creepy books my mom apparently picked up at random book fairs.)

As always, email your answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or enter below in comments. Winner gets free galley of Shelf Discovery!

Also:

You can BUY Shelf Discovery by clicking here

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Enjoy the weekend!!!!!!!
Lizzie

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'Stranger With My Face', Lois Duncan's 1981 novel in which Laurie Stratton gets every girl's wish: to be adopted, and to have a secret twin sister.

My name is Laurie Stratton. I am seventeen years old, and I live at the Cliff House on the northern tip of Brighton Island.

Would it have been so hard to let me astrally project, God? I know the telepathy was not a possibility, as by second grade, my peers and I were already running numerous controlled studies using the means of scrap paper and different corners of the room, and to succeed would have granted me far too much power amongst them. I know you gave me precognition that one time about winning that contest in 8th grade and it was so spooky I could never have handled any more spook. I am way too OCD to move things with my mind, and I know, as I am not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I cannot be a witch. HOWEVER.

I don't see what the PROBLEM would have been with allowing me to freaking LEAVE MY BODY FROM TIME TO TIME AND TRAVEL THE WORLD, BOUND ONLY BY AN INVISIBLE CORD LINKED TO MY TRUE SPIRIT WHILE MY BODY WAS TEMPORARILY A HUSK, A SHELL, TO ALL APPEARANCES DEAD!

In any case, Laurie Stratton, unbeknownst-to-self-child-of-the-Navajo-with-twin-sister, is far more blessed than I. (Nava-ho!) In Stranger With My Face, Duncan has ditched her typical Southwest setting for the rocky shoals of coastal New England, where our heroine lives with her mother and father, a painter and writer, respectively, and two sweet younger siblings, Neal and Megan. Also in the mix is Laurie's so-psyched-to-no-longer-be-gawky prize of a ripped boyfriend, Gordon; a brooding, darkly handsome acquaintance, Jeff, whose face was half-burned off by an exploded can of lighter fluid; and, of course, an expert outsider WITH insider extrasensory knowledge, Laurie's schoolmate Helen Tuttle, who has recently moved from the Southwest and becomes Laurie's new friend.

Interestingly, the first few scenes of the novel, as befits the events to come, are rife with splits in which one element is not only the opposite of the other, but the veritable photo negative. First is Laurie's passage from gawky to glamorous—a constant Duncan trope at the beginnings of her novel's. Laurie's improved looks not only alter her appearance but her entire social currency:

In every girl's life, I guess, there must be one special summer that is a turning point, a time of stretching and reaching and blossoming out and leaving childhood behind. This was the summer that had happened to me. The year before, I had been awkward and gawky, all pointed knees and sharp elbows and bony rib cage, hiding my shyness behind a book while girls like Natalie Coleson and Darlene Briggs wriggled around in their bikinis and got boys to buy them Cokes and rub them with baby oil.

This summer it had all been different. The first day I walked out onto the beach, clutching my book and my beach towel, I heard a wolf whistle.

Another split is found in Jeff Rankin, a former crush of Laurie's who is now moody and withheld, though il a raison:

He was fourteen that first year, with the sort of dark, flashy good looks that by rights should have belonged to someone much older. The second summer he came, he had a motor bike, and there was always some squealing girl sitting on it behind him, with her arms wrapped around his waist and her chin on his shoulder. Sometimes her hair was dark and blond and sometimes red, but it was always long and shiny, flying out behind them like the tail of a comet as they went roaring down the road.

I turned fourteen myself that year—a skinny, flat-chested fourteen—and I dreamed at night about what it would be like to be one of those girls.

....it was a good thing Jeff did have that summer, because halfway through the next one a can of lighter fluid exploded and burned off half his face...

The left side of his face was fine. If you saw him at a certain angle, you'd have thought he was the best-looking guy you'd ever seen. If you saw him from the right, you had to stop and swallow hard.

It occurs to me that even the fact that Laurie is recounting, not experiencing, the events in question, leads to a sort of narrative split, the dreadful present aftermath merging with a golden past. (Does not "There was a time when I, too, loved Cliff House," have more than a whiff of "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again"?)

However, the biggest initial split is with Laurie and her own family—from whom she is inherently estranged, just as Jeff is to his old face, by looks:

I didn't have the sort of looks you found just everywhere. Gordon kidded sometimes that I could be part Indian with my dark coloring, high cheekbones and almond eyes. "Bedroom eyes," he called them, meaning they were sexy. My father referred to them as "alien" because they were the same shape as the eyes he gave to the maidens from other worlds in his novels. When I looked at my parents—both of them so fair—and at Neal and Meg with their light blue eyes and freckled noses, I wondered sometimes how I had managed to be born into such a family.

Well, duh, you weren't! However, we don't learn this from Dad and Mom. (Who, p.s., are a "night person" and a "day person" whose schedules only briefly coincide, just to pile this kind of thing on.) Instead, we learn this from a sepulchral presence around town who people keep mistaking for Laurie. As the days pass, "Laurie" appears at a party the actual Laurie has begged off of, enraging Gordon; in the house, confusing Laurie's parents; at the Post Office, where she accepts a birthday invite that she fails to pass on, enraging the birthday girl; and in various lonely poses around the dunes surrounding Cliff House.

Laurie is beside herself at how this could be happening, but, luckily, Helen Tuttle, child of the Southwest, holder of knowledge of the Navajo, and former girlfriend of Luis, a Navajo, is there to point out an explanation other than Laurie's going crazy:

...."I was home in bed the whole time,"

"You weren't using astral projection, were you?" Helen asked.

"Using what?" I said in bewilderment.

"You know—sending your mind out from your body? Luis's father used to be able to do it."

Aw, sheet. Is someone gonna take a book or two out from the library? You know they is! Okay, but getting ahead of myself. Laurie finally gets the answer to her question, when she is visited, in a profound dream, by Lia, who claims to be her twin sister and leans across and gives her a spooky astral-projection kiss. At this point, in possession of a towering mountain of supernatural proof, Laurie confronts her parents, whose reaction is, to put it mildly, not-open. "The trend today is toward total openness about adoption," her father says. "Still, that idea has been upsetting to your mother....Laurie, it's not that big a deal. You're the same person you always were. You're our beloved daughter....Now that you know your background, there's nothing left for you to wonder about. Can't we just file this away and get on with our normal lives?"

Um, let's just file THAT away for a second, and I will come back to it. (Incidentally, as someone who's approximately 9,873 years old, I have to admit I remember very well when this kind of secrecy was the norm, oh young Juno fans.) What's more key for the plot at this point is her mother's explanation of why her parents, confronted with a set of beautiful, mixed-blood Navajo twins to adopt, did not just snag both:

"Then, why—" The question rose to my lips without my even realizing that I was going to ask it. "Why did you take me instead of her?"

"We couldn't raise both of you," Dad said. "We were going out on a limb to take even one dependent at that point in our lives."

"That's not what I asked," I said. "What I want to know is, why did you choose me over my sister?"

There was a moment's silence as my parents exchanged glances.

Then Dad said slowly, "Your mother—your mother, well, she thought—"

"I didn't want her," Mother said. Her normally gentle voice was strangely sharp. "I just didn't want her. I wanted you."

"But if we were just a like—"

"You weren't alike," Mother said. "You looked just alike—both of you so beautiful with big, solemn eyes and all that thick, dark hair. The people at the agency wanted us to take you both, and despite what Dad says, I really think we might have done it. It seemed wrong to separate twin sisters. I picked you up and cuddled you, and I knew I never wanted to let you go. It was as though you were meant to be ours. Then I handed you to Dad to hold and picked up the other baby, and—and—"

"And what?" I prodded.

"I wanted to put her down."

BECAUSE LIA IS EVIL, OBVIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!! And, of course, the machinations of Lia's evil, as they unfold in the novel, are great fun. Not only does she put Helen Tuttle in the hospital (the ability of specters to put people in hospitals in the novels of Lois Duncan must only be exceeded by the ability of the shark in the Jaws franchise to increasingly have the ability to handily kill people on dry land), she lures Jeff and Laurie to a near-death experience, and, having alienated Laurie completely from her peers and those who love her, manages to invade her body and steal her entire life.

BUT NOT SO FAST, LIA!

Because rather than entirely cut the cord of Laurie Stratton from all the elements of her life, ironically, Lia's invasion, in the end, strengthens them. Lia's ruining of friendships brought on Laurie's new social status only makes Laurie realize how tenuous those bonds were in the first place, and how glad she can be in Helen's truer loyalty. Her interruption of the placid family structure of the Strattons forces Laurie's parents to realize how damaging their inability to face Laurie's adoption was, which in turn allows Laurie to realize she is, in the end, a Stratton who loves and is loved her family. And, most important, when Lia splits Laurie and Gordon apart, she actually brings Jeff and Laurie together—not coincidentally because Jeff, unlike Gordon, is willing to face the question of Lia and Laurie's adoption, and he's also willing to talk about the weirder question of what Megan calls Laurie's "ghosty":

"Look, Jeff, there's no sense in our discussing this. You don't believe in astral projection, and I don't blame you. I couldn't accept it myself until just recently." A question occurred to me. "What were you doing here the night you thought you saw me? There's no reason for anyone to come out this way unless he's coming to Cliff House."

"I walk here sometimes because you live here," Jeff said.

Um, line of dialog in Sixteen Candles where Jake tells Molly Ringwald that he's come to the church because "I heard you were here," you have a freaking RIVAL FOR BEST LINE EVER!

But, even though the ostensible point of the novel is that looks don't matter because those who love us, like Laurie's savior and little sister Megan, can look past them to the true self beneath, of course, looks do matter. Not only are they a constant subject within Laurie's family before Laurie knows about Lia, as the novel commences, Laurie and Jeff's changing looks have reversed the course of their entire lives. Duncan's point about our appearance versus our true self is much more subtle. In the scene where Laurie, loosed from her own body, regards the sleeping Lia, we can see that clearly:

She was a duplicate of myself....yet there were differences.

This girl's ears were pierced, and mine were not. Mother and I had gone through a few rounds on that issue, and she had won. "There are enough natural holes in a person's anatomy," she had said firmly.

....There was a tiny scar on the chin that might have been nothing more than the result of scratching an insect bite, but it was a scar that I did not have.

There was a mole on the neck at a spot where I had no mole.

I continued my inspection...She had perfect fingernails, the kind that had always filled me with envy. My own had a scraggly look, not exactly "bitten to the quick," but "slightly gnawed."

Small things. Unimportant. Almost unnoticeable, yet they spelled the difference between Lia Abbott and Laurie Stratton.

So it is not that looks don't matter. Not only do they matter to others—they matter because they reflect choices we have made, what has been done by us and to us. Our looks may start with what life had dealt us, but they are also about the lives we lead. So it's not that you can't read a book by its cover. It's that if you do (look up), it's not the title or illustration you should look at — it's the nicks, creases, and dog-ears that tell the tale.

• • • • •

Hello, my pretties! Okay, for this week's extraordinarily depressing Plotfinder there were few called and fewer still to serve. The winner, beating my best friend's, "Ooooo, I know I read that but I can't remember the title," which I think I will start to refer to as a Not-finder, was the commenter The Former June Bronson, who clocked in with Randy at 12:59 pm. Ms. Bronson, I can find no supporting information for this book whatsoever and am not even sure if this is the right Randy. (YOU try plugging "Randy" into Google.) However, we operate on the honor system at Jezebel, and I'm sure I will imminently receive delighted confirmation from my Not-finder in any case.

Now, onto this week's Plotfinder, which comes from reader Hannah K., and kind of makes me hungry:

It's about this girl (I think her name is Kate) who is really tall, and her older brother's friend comes to visit for the winter holidays with his hot girlfriend, but is reminded of his childhood crush on the protagonist and stuff starts to develop between them...and there is this part right at the beginning in the supermarket where she's buying cinnamon sticks and she sees their elderly neighbor, who later dies (I think), and there is this episode about mice in somebody's car engine getting killed (maybe the neighbor?), and ultimately she starts dating the guy but her (former?) best friend steals him from her at a Christmas party at somebody's aunt's tacky mansion, and she sees them kissing and, like, dumps him forever, and ultimately the boy camps outside the house (I hope this is all from the same book) to win back her love and everything is OK in the end. Also, I think she wears glasses?

As always, send your guesses to jezziefinelines@gmail.com or stick 'em in the comments. First one with correct guess gets to choose a column, and I'll do it.

I'd also like to give a shoutout to readers Ilona and Hillary, who provided me with scans of the cover you see above—each, incidentally, marked distinctly by its owner. For their labors, they will each receive a vintage copy of Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes from my personal collection.

Next week, the lovely and talented Mizz Laura M. Lippman guests with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase so I can buy some goddamn cinnamon sticks in peace. After that, we'll resume our regular schedule our pre-informing for your future reading purposes, but for now, like Laurie, languish briefly in the mystery.

Did you hear? A book approaches! Glory to! Would you like to know all about it? You would? Send me an email at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words, YES, I HAVE TO DO THIS EVERY WEEK in the subject line and I'll put you on it.

As ever, send your Plotfinder requests, objections and obfuscations to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Rest assured, I take each email in my inbox, prepare to leap, and scream "Erase the words!" before I break free of this mortal coil.

Stranger With My Face [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'A Gift Of Magic, Lois Duncan's 1971 story of 11-year-old Nancy Barrett, whose grandmother bequeaths her a totally ESPecial legacy.

If every author has their red-headed stepchild of a book (John Updike: The Witches of Eastwick: WTF?), every author also has the book that, whether it's a reader favorite or not, seems the purest expression of their very authorial being.

For me, A Gift of Magic has always been that most scalp-prickling of a work—even more striking because the book eschews the convention Duncan is best known for among teen readers: namely, being fucking terrifying. (Do I still think of Lia's half-smile in Stranger With My Face while she's looking at herself in the mirror, brushing her purely evil hair with her twin sister LAURA'S BRUSH right after she's stolen her body, preparing to step out into the evening and go steal her BOYFRIEND, with measurable trembling? Do you even have to ask?) But there's no evil twin, no menacing stranger in A Gift of Magic — only a girl fighting with a power she does not yet understand or control.

When the book begins, our precogriffic heroine Nancy Barrett, older sister, Kirby, and younger brother Brendon have just been taken by their mother, Elizabeth, back to her childhood home in Florida. This follows Elizabeth's amicable separation from their father, a war photographer who dragged his entire family all over the world on an endless international heat-seeking jaunt that left them global travelers but curiously sheltered. So sheltered, actually, that the entire family takes Nancy's gift for knowing who's on the phone or that someone is coming to the door completely for granted, and the reader is introduced to Nancy's psychic powers on the first page in a suitable blink-and-you'd-miss-it way:

Nancy pulled herself awake and sat up in bed. "Mother's crying," she said.

It was a stupid question. Of course, there was something wrong. There had been something wrong for days, for weeks, for months even. Now that the words had actually been spoken, Nancy could feel, with a sick kind of acceptance, the great wave of wrongness rising higher and higher above them, ready to come toppling over to swamp them all. With a violent effort she braced herself against it and made her mind go closed.

She closed her eyes tightly and reached out—out—across the miles, the hundreds and thousands of miles—to the place where their father was....it was a business lunch and he was getting briefed on the next assignment. There was a notebook by his plate and a pencil, but the page of the book was empty, for he had not been taking notes. His mind was away from the conversation...

Still, the change is most severe on Nancy, who not only must deal with poking around in all of her family's heads and feeling what's going on with them, but also that her ESP — which she does not even know is called ESP, EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS ESP — does not fly as easily in the world of the public high school. As this is a pre-Blubber era narrative, when teacher abuse still trumped peer abuse, Nancy's harsh debut into the world of the unbelieving takes place when she mistakenly starts putting the answers to a geography quiz down before the teacher has even asked the questions:

"No, Nancy, you did not imagine these questions," Miss Green said. "They are exactly the questions that I asked the previous classes. I would be very interested in learning how you knew what they would be."

There was a long silence. All around them, heads were raised and turned in their direction. Thirty pens were held, suspended, over thirty sheets of paper as thirty students waited to hear Nancy's explanation.

"I—I don't know," Nancy said slowly. "I just sort of—knew. I do that sometimes."

"Wait," he said. "Now, let's wait a minute, Miss Green. I would like to hear a bit more about this ability of Nancy's. There is such a thing as extrasensory perception, you know, although we don't run into it to often."

"Extrasensory perception?" Miss Green's mouth fell open. She stared at the counselor as though she thought he had gone crazy. "Oh, come now, Mr. Duncan, surely you can't be serious!"

"Indeed I am," Mr. Duncan said firmly. "ESP does exist. I am quite positive of it. I have known these girls' family for years, and I have often wondered if their grandmother didn't possess the gift..."

And with this revelation, Nancy has a name for what has always been—and starts to realize that she, like Kirby, may also have something that distinguishes her as an individual:

"Well, what is it exactly?" Kirby asked. "Is there more than one kind?"

"There sure is." Nancy referred to the book. "There's one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what the other person is thinking. Then there's clairvoyance; that means knowing when something's happened. There are two other kinds two—precognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past."

"....It's your gift, isn't it? This ESP thing? Like my gift is dancing? ...."

Because A Gift of Magic isn't so much about a girl with ESP as it is about a family that, plopped like spores in a new environment, have to learn how to grow without destroying themselves. Kirby, given the freedom to study dance all her passionate heart desires, has to learn to not become completely anorexic and starve herself to look like a dancer, then fall down and break her leg and almost lose the gift because of nerve damage, but then triumphantly be okay. Elizabeth has to learn that it's all right to let go of the past, and marry Tom Duncan and be her own person, even if her daughter Nancy isn't thrilled about it. Brendon, whose gift is music, has to learn that even if he's going to squander that gift, it's still not a good idea to make a boat out of a door and old crates and set sail into the Gulf, and that if he does, he better shout loudly at his psychic sister's mind so she and Tom Duncan can save him before he drowns on the spit. And it's Nancy, most of all, who has to learn that her powers aren't evil, and they're not all-encompassing — they're just another part of her, a gift given out of love. Also that she should butt out of her mother's business.

Do they still write books about ESP and various other girls charged with special powers all the time? Because I've always wondered if those bloomed in particular during the 70s and 80s because it was a time before a fractured family became a given, and that, if it's the case, for the daughters growing up in a new hierarchy, they struck a particularly hopeful note. Because Nancy's family has undergone a turbulent dissolution, true, but it doesn't crush her — in fact, it gives her the ability to learn more about herself and what she can achieve than she would have had her mother stuck out an unhappy marriage. Duncan is having fun with faux-spookily showing off Nancy's special powers, true. But at the end of the day, A Gift of Magic is redemptive because it is simply about power.


•Ladies: I am so sorry — one week spacing and one week off and I completely forgot to announce the winner for the previous challenge, viz: Name the book in which one best friend moves to NY and they buy matching dresses in purple and orange on a visit and the new New Yorker chides her country bumpkin pal for saying "Avenue of the Americas" instead of Sixth Avenue.

The answer is, of course, "The Trouble With Thirteen," by Betty Miles, and the winner is Sarah R., the subject line of whose email read, "I think about it every time I cross 6th." ME TOO. Sarah, write me a jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize — you can suggest any book to Fine Lines and I will do it within the next month (ish).

This week's challenge is actually kind of impossible, and if anyone gets it, they deserve some sort of actual, tangible award — like a "Fine Lines" commemorative bookmark or something. As it is, I only have the gift of the column itself. So. What is the book that has a cover of a girl with her head on the table, looking sideways at — I kid you not — a marble green egg of the chochke variety? The girl, I believe, has bangs and long brown hair, and it's an actual photograph, not an illustration. The book is about a very messy divorce in NY where the stepmother comes to live with the family.

You can enter in the the comments or write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com, where you can also write with book suggestions and any other semi-related demands. Also, does anyone have the right cover for this thing? I actually grew up with the one with the girl's face in front of pink clouds looking all intense and psychic, and I will not feel whole without it. Thanks in advance to sympathetic scanners.

Earlier: Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
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•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
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•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
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•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die