Revisiting Homefree With BDT

Today is BDT's first day of fifth grade, meaning his first day teaching fifth grade. In honor of the occasion, I'm going to pass on his thoughts about one of the first Cybils books he read.

I had a very up-and-down experience reading Homefree by Nina Wright. Among other things, I felt it relied very heavily on coincidence. Coincidence is believable in real life because real life is real. In books it can be a problem. The main character in Homefree seemed to know a great many people with paranormal abilities. What are the odds? I mean, I know Homefree is a school for paranormal kids, but at the beginning of the story the main character isn't there, yet. She just keeps running into all these unusual kids. I repeat, what are the odds?

BDT, however, was more enthusiastic.

"I see what you were saying about it being like X-Men," he wrote me, "and I thought the book itself was quite good. I found myself skimming through the "teen angst and trouble" parts and just getting to the main plot and action lines, but I enjoyed it."

He also said he "appreciated" the discussion questions at the back of the book. Did I mention that he's a teacher?

So a younger, less jaded reader had a more positive response to the book than I did.

UPDATE! UPDATE! After BDT saw this post, he e-mailed me the following:

"I think that there isn't as much coincidence in Homefree as you think. They say at the end of the book that Easter (the girl) is a Finder, which sounds to me like she is naturally drawn to people with superhuman abiltities. It could be that the author intends us to believe that her whole life has been this way, since she has a predisposition to associate with these people."