Reviews: (by author)

Hurst, Carol. The Wrong One. Boston,Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 2003. ISBN 0-618-27599-1. $15.00.

A strange blue light, an old-fashioned visitor from the past, an evanescent shop, and the magical intuition of Sookan, the Korean five-year-old, lead to a magical solution of the money problem. After one false alarm, a real antique doll is found in the wall of the house, as hinted at by the visitor and by Sookan, and raises $100,000 to fix the house and support the children in their new life in the country. Although the setting and the family are described in realistic terms, the strange magical events and emanations remain inexplicable.

Rather a strange combination of realism and fantasy, this work features a fatherless American family which has recently adopted a Korean orphan. With mother the sole wage-earner, the family moves out of New York into the country into a dilapidated house with serious remodeling needs, a challenging social environment, and a family with multicultural communication problems.

Carole Scott 12/03

Back to Reviews G-K