Sweeping Up the Heart

Starred review from March 1, 2019

Gr 4 Up-Amelia Albright wakes on the first day of her spring break with low expectations for a dull week at home. While she thinks everyone else is relaxing in Florida, her vacation turns out to be anything but ordinary. As Amelia strikes up an unexpected friendship with Casey, the nephew of the owner of the art studio Amelia frequents, she wavers on the edge of feelings she has never before experienced. Casey confides in Amelia about the emotional pain with which he's struggling as he watches his parents' marriage crumble. When the pair sees a woman around town resembling Amelia's deceased mother, they theorize she is the embodiment of her spirit. While Amelia becomes increasingly hopeful about the possibility of her mother still being alive, her father's guarded personal life threatens to upset the balance of their predictable family. Guided with love and understanding by her neighbor, Mrs. O'Brien, Amelia's heart will awaken to feelings of sorrow, love, and grace. A stunning realistic fiction novel, Amelia's story is woven tightly with themes of friendship, grief, and love. In his signature classic style, Henkes perfectly captures the hope paramount to the youthful heart, while honoring difficult themes with which young readers can identify. Readers struggling with difficult family situations will identify with the protagonists. VERDICT This smooth, compact, emotionally nuanced novel with relatable characters should be a first purchase for every library where readers' hearts are ready to melt.-Amy McInerney, Falmouth Elementary School, ME

Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2018
Grades 3-6 A lonely girl's life changes over spring break in this understated novel from multi-award-winning Henkes. Adults think Amelia is a poor thing: her mother died when she was two, and her reserved English professor father spends a lot of time in his office. Her kind neighbor Mrs. O'Brien takes excellent care of her, but nevertheless, Amelia?who loves Emily Dickinson and making ceramic rabbits at the clay studio?knows that her life is rather constricted. But over spring break, Amelia meets Casey, who becomes the first boy to ever be her friend. She also realizes that a mysterious woman who looks like her dead mother might be following her. As Amelia discovers the mystery woman's identity, her world opens up in both exciting and scary ways. Amelia is a winning character: a dreamy, old soul who perfectly displays the naivety and the wisdom of growing up. Humor and lyrical language buoy the gently somber narrative. Henkes' latest story is, like most life changes, quiet yet momentous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2019
The elegiac spirit of Emily Dickinson's poem The Bustle in a House (from which this book's title is taken) reverberates throughout Henkes's story of people struggling to cope with love, loss, change, and human frailty. Twelve-year-old Amelia Albright is dreading her upcoming spring-break week (the novel's time frame) at home in Madison, Wisconsin. Her best friend is away for the year, and her melancholic and withdrawn father has rejected the idea of a Florida vacation. With encouragement from their loving housekeeper, Amelia seeks solace at the local clay studio where she has been going since she was six. She meets and befriends the studio owner's visiting nephew, Casey, whose parents are busy working on their marriage. Casey desperately wants his parents to stay together; meanwhile, the loss of Amelia's mother, who died of cancer when she was two, still hangs heavily over her. ( Can you be lonely for someone you never knew? ) When they encounter a woman who looks like Amelia's mother, the friends begin to imagine the impossible, making this woman's actual identity, when discovered, all the harder to process. In that confusing space between childhood and adulthood, Amelia finds comfort in talking to her beloved stuffed lamb even as she experiences her first crush and wonders what kind of woman she would be when she grew up. The week's cheerlessness morphs into something complex and important as new people enter Amelia's world, enabling her to better understand herself and those she loves, and to move forward into whatever was still to come. julie roach

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

March 1, 2019
The elegiac spirit of Emily Dickinson's poem The Bustle in a House (from which this book's title is taken) reverberates throughout Henkes's story of people struggling to cope with love, loss, change, and human frailty. Twelve-year-old Amelia Albright is dreading her upcoming spring-break week (the novel's time frame) at home in Madison, Wisconsin. Her best friend is away for the year, and her melancholic and withdrawn father has rejected the idea of a Florida vacation. With encouragement from their loving housekeeper, Amelia seeks solace at the local clay studio where she has been going since she was six. She meets and befriends the studio owner's visiting nephew, Casey, whose parents are busy working on their marriage. Casey desperately wants his parents to stay together; meanwhile, the loss of Amelia's mother, who died of cancer when she was two, still hangs heavily over her. ( Can you be lonely for someone you never knew? ) When they encounter a woman who looks like Amelia's mother, the friends begin to imagine the impossible, making this woman's actual identity, when discovered, all the harder to process. In that confusing space between childhood and adulthood, Amelia finds comfort in talking to her beloved stuffed lamb even as she experiences her first crush and wonders what kind of woman she would be when she grew up. The week's cheerlessness morphs into something complex and important as new people enter Amelia's world, enabling her to better understand herself and those she loves, and to move forward into whatever was still to come. julie roach

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

July 1, 2019
In this story of coping with loss and change, lonely twelve-year-old Amelia befriends the local clay studio owner's visiting nephew, Casey, during spring-break week. When they encounter a woman resembling Amelia's mother--who died when Amelia was two--the friends begin to imagine the impossible. The week's cheerlessness morphs into something complex and important as new people enter Amelia's world, enabling her to better understand herself and those she loves.

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from December 1, 2018
A seventh-grader in 1999 wonders when her real life will start--this spring break, she'll find out.Her friend Natalie is spending a year in France, while Amelia's widowed, emotionally distant father won't even take her to Florida for one week! Love, support, and the excellent baking of their housekeeper, Mrs. O'Brien, a neighbor in her 70s, partly reconcile Amelia to staying home in Madison, Wisconsin, where at least she'll have time for creating ceramic animals at Louise's clay studio. At first Amelia's dismayed to find a strange boy there--it's Louise's nephew, Casey, visiting while his parents go on a retreat, hoping to save their failing marriage. Casey confesses that his campaign to keep them together isn't going well. Amelia can relate. Her mother died when Amelia was 2; with her father seldom home and Natalie in France, she feels unsettled and adrift. Active imaginations and shared creativity strengthen the preteens' bond. Spotting a woman who resembles Amelia, Casey suggests she could be her mother, possibly reborn. Pursuing this intriguing idea spawns unexpected developments that spur Amelia's emotional growth (reflected in the Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the title). Captured on the threshold of puberty's tumultuous changes, Amelia and Casey quiver with hope and longing. Like a Chinese brush painting made of words, this short novel distills the slow-building impatience of early adolescence down to its essence--not much happens, yet everything does. The primary cast presents white.Spare, luminous, lovely. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.