Megan's Island, by Willo Davis Roberts

[rachelmanija]

I checked this out because I loved Roberts' The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which was one of her two SFF books. (The other is The Magic Book, which I have not read.) She was mostly a writer of children's thrillers, most famously The View From the Cherry Tree.

Megan and her younger brother Sandy have moved around a lot, as their single mom, a widow from before Megan can remember, often changes jobs. One day she abruptly uproots them in the middle of school and rushes them to her father's cabin by a lake. She refuses to explain anything and leaves them with him, saying she has something she needs to do and he's not to explain anything to them either. There's a cozy interval while Megan and Sandy explore an island in the lake, but Megan is understandably very worried and frustrated. Especially when their grandfather has to go to the hospital, leaving them alone, and strange men appear looking for them...



I had assumed that their father was abusive and their mom was fleeing from him. It's much more baroque than that. Their father embezzled some money and died in jail, while their other grandfather - the father's father - is a wealthy asshole who threatened to get custody of the children by painting their mother as unfit. She panicked, changed their names, and fled, and has been staying one step ahead of the grandfather ever since.

At the end, the grandfather agrees to not try to get custody, saying he had overreacted and now he just wants to meet them. They all agree to this.



It's... fine. Roberts has a nice easy-reading style. But I felt like it could have gone farther in both coziness and thrills, and the ending was pretty anticlimactic.

Comments

[shati]

Yeah, I remember reading this as a kid, but I forgot basically everything you described of the plot -- all I really remember is being jealous of Megan's hair.

[rachelmanija]

Haha. Her bright red hair was a plot point - the kids' names had been changed, so strange men were prowling around asking if anyone had seen a red-headed girl and younger boy.

[osprey_archer]

I adored Roberts' The Girl with the Silver Eyes (big fan of ESP books as a child!) and then inexplicably never read any of her other books. Maybe my library just didn't have any of the others? Or I turned up my nose because none of them involved telepathic children? Who can say.

It sounds like this one wasn't a big loss, at any rate. Curious about The Magic Book, though!

[yhlee]

Aww, pity. I adored The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which I read out of the library as a small child, but never found any other books by the author.

[paperscribe]

So happy to find other fans of (and, actually, others who’ve read) The Girl with the Silver Eyes ! (Between that and Matilda , I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to move stuff with my mind.)

[rachelmanija]

Me too. To this day I dream of being telekinetic in a low-key way, and am always startled to wake up and find that I can't move objects with my mind after all.

[queenbookwench]

I remember being rather fond of this one, but didn't remember the mystery elements--just Megan being at the lake and feeling disaffected.
o
These all got reissued recently, and I feel like Roberts still really works for a specific kind of kid--one who likes mystery but not TOO many scares, and is up for some moody atmosphere rather than constant action.

[rachelmanija]

I'm delighted that she's still being read.

[queenbookwench]

The new editions had covers that were both minimalist and somehow cartoon-y, which I didn't hate but wasn't sure they did anything to sell them to the reader who'd like them--it kinda felt like they were going for the vibe of Carl Hiassen's middle grade covers, or Stuart Gibbs'? Which both have mystery/suspense elements, sure, but they're more overtly comedic than what I (vaguely) remember of Roberts' (mostly View from the Cherry Tree, this one, and Girl With the Silver Eyes)

[viridian5]

I didn't know Willo Davis Roberts wrote any SFF. The only Roberts book I read was in the Sunfire YA historical romance series, Caroline, in which a girl masquerades as a boy as she goes out on her own to join her brother, who went out west to find gold in California during the gold rush.

[rachelmanija]

I didn't know she wrote for Sunfire! How was it?

[viridian5]

Now that I researched a bit, I see that she wrote two other books for Sunfire as well, Elizabeth and Victoria, which I must have read because I read all the Sunfire books back when, but Caroline was my teenaged favorite of them. I liked it quite a bit, and the bits of her having to figure out ways to disguise her true sex while traveling with strangers added something memorable. It also helped that the book didn't bother with the love triangles common to a lot of the Sunfires, in that one of the guys is Caroline's brother (and it's not that kind of book).