Watersmeet

Fours Crossing #2

by Nancy Garden

Barely recovered from being kidnapped by the now-jailed hermit, Melissa and Jed find themselves still in danger for reasons that are rooted in the past history of their New Hampshire village.

Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

201 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1983

About the author

A versatile writer, Nancy Garden has published books for children as well as for teens, nonfiction as well as fiction. But her novel Annie on My Mind, the story of two high school girls who fall in love with each other, has brought her more attention than she wanted when it was burned in front of the Kansas City School Board building in 1993 and banned from school library shelves in Olathe, Kansas, as well as other school districts. A group of high school students and their parents in Olathe had to sue the school board in federal district court in order to get the book back on the library shelves. Today the book is as controversial as ever, in spite of its being viewed by many as one of the most important books written for teens in the past forty years. In 2003 the American Library Association gave the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Nancy Garden for lifetime achievement.

In Remembrance: Nancy Garden

Reviews

[Jennifer Heise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I held on to my copy of Fours Crossing, a Scholastic Paperback, for many years, because though the story was slight-- to my mind-- I periodically found myself going back to re-read it. This sequel has the same draw for me, though I just read it-- it's patently absurd and poorly put together on the face of it, and yet is has a reading pleasure to it, a sort of magical realism.
After the snows that locked Fours Crossing in for so long melted, there was, as you would expect, a flood. A strange woman turns up in the scramble to evacuate and she ends up having some connection to the hermit who kidnapped Melissa and Jed, calling them by the names of a long-dead pair. Rhiannon, as she calls herself, seems to be the opposite of the hermit, but there grows some suspicion of her in the village, especially during and after the hermit's trial. But Rhiannon says that there is a more important problem going on; how can Melissa find out what's afoot and do something about it?

I have to say that the more recent (2010's) teen fantasy I read with a plot of a mystery and a mysterious pagan heritage doesn't stand a chance compared to this.