Sharon Creech is one of America's most accomplished children's writers. She won the Carnegie medal for Ruby Holler, a quirky tale about two orphans called Dallas and Florida. Even better was Love That Dog, an uncategorisable but brilliant novel made entirely of poems, arranged in the form of a diary. It remains one of the finest and most original children's books of recent years.
The Great Unexpected never hits the heights of Love That Dog few books do but is very much in the mould of Ruby Holler. Again, it's the story of two orphans, this time called Naomi and Lizzie. They live in an American small town, and much of the story follows their exploits there, beginning when a boy who may or may not be a ghost falls out of a tree.
This is interwoven with a parallel story set in Ireland, where two old ladies discuss revenge, murders and inheritances. Gradually, these two strands of the book come together, as the connections between them are revealed.
The result is something very different from most current children's fiction a gently timeless atmosphere to which few modern authors aspire. In this book, things can certainly be unexpected, strange, even supernatural, but they're seldom bad. Given its title and subject matter, you might expect it to be positively Dickensian. Yet its closest kin may be Studio Ghibli's animated fantasies, especially My Neighbour Totoro, conceived as a film without any conflict. Its mix of everyday magic and understated emotion is Creech's territory, too.
Her protagonists have suffered terrible trauma and loss, but she treats these subjects with a featherlight touch and a whimsical humour that's always present, even when children describe their parents dying "of the maximum grief". Death is never far away, and many of the characters we meet may well be ghosts, yet they go about their normal business nonetheless. This is never explained or resolved; it's left to readers to form their own conclusions.
Some will find this mysterious and numinous; others may find it evasive and unrealistic. Creech's epigraph seems to anticipate the latter reaction by posing the question: "What is 'real'?" Don't let her light touch fool you into thinking that her work is somehow lightweight; there's substance here, too.
The whimsy is anchored in flashes of telling detail about bereavement: the awful things people say to each other at funerals; the particular mustiness one encounters when sifting through a deceased person's effects; and the sense of disconnection that the living often feel at such times.
It's at its best when evoking moments of almost weightless grace, as when Naomi and the possibly dead boy kiss. "He glided towards me. He floated towards me His lips touched my cheek, lightly, like the swish of a butterfly's wing, and because I felt awkward and did not know how to respond, I lifted his hand and softly kissed his palm."
The swish of a butterfly's wing is indeed what this book feels like to read. But is it possible that the prose novel is not the best vehicle for this kind of project? Might poetry not suit it better? Love That Dog can be read in less than half an hour, yet it conjures the deepest emotions from the tiniest scraps of information.
The Great Unexpected is certainly worthwhile, as all Creech's books are, but perhaps she can go further still with the unique verse-novel form that so perfectly matches her gifts.
SF Said's The Outlaw Varjak Paw is published by David Fickling Books.
