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Fantasy. Juvenile Fiction. HTML: Amy's new town holds a secret far more wondrous than she could ever imagine Taylor Springs is the place where Amy's family grew up, and it felt like her hometown even before she moved there. But there is one place that her family left out of their stories: the supposedly haunted Stone Hollow, a hidden valley with an old, deserted cottage. And though Amy is curious, she can't get a straight answer about it from anyone�??well, anyone except Jason. Jason has explored Stone Hollow, and he doesn't think it's haunted. He has a different theory: He believes it's a place where time folds and moves over itself, replaying scenes and moments from the past. And sometimes, the past comes back in unexpected and unwanted ways. Amy doesn't believe Jason at first, but soon she realizes that things aren't always as they seem. Could Jason be right about the secret of Stone Hollow? This ebook features an extended biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder.… (more)
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Forbidding him to mention their friendship at school, Amy spends her Sunday afternoons with Jason, and as they explore Stone Hollow, they slowly unravel the tragic history of the sinister place. Once a site of worship for Native Americans, the valley was settled by an Italian-American family who all came to tragic ends through disease, disappearance and madness, and next inhabited by a pair of bootleggers who died in suspicious circumstances. The children discover a grotto at the far end of the valley which contains a mysterious stone, one that Jason claims allows him to see people who are not there.
The process whereby Amy and Jason discover the nature of this stone - what it truly does, and how it has effected the many generations to call Stone Hollow home - is mirrored by the growing bond of friendship between them. Amy's own personal experience with the stone, shortly before she and her family must leave town once again, teaches her an additional (and very important) lesson: that truth is frequently tied to perspective, and that different people can know very different truths about the same people and events. The Truth About Stone Hollow is another of those haunting Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories which seems perfectly suited to its time period (the later years of the Great Depression, in this case), and yet, oddly timeless as well. In this respect, it reminded me of another Snyder title set in Depression-era California, The Velvet Room, and that is no small praise! Although not one of the author's very best - which title must go to books like The Changeling and Below the Root - it is still amongst her strongest, and deserves to be better known than it appears, from the paucity of online reviews, to be.
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| Fic Childrens Snyder |