But the bone begins to grow, reaching up out of the ground until it turns into a skeleton - a skeleton with an unusual interest in his unwell younger sister Miren. When Stanley Stanwright finds a bone poking out of the earth in his back garden, he is determined to take a picture of it and send it to the Young Discoverer's Competition, thinking it will help bring his dad back home. As time wears on, Miren's condition worsens, and the only time she is truly at peace is when she is playing with the skeleton.

This entry was posted on, in 2017, Children's Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, General. It just looks wrong the way it is in this book. However, the sadness of Miren’s illness, the dad’s neglect of his family, and Stanly’s mom’s very difficult financial and living situation finally got to me, and I really didn’t want to finish the book, even though I had to know what would happen to Stanly and Miren and Princy.Īlso, I know it’s so minor as to be nitpicking, but I really think Stanly should be spelled with an “e”, “Stanley”. I really liked parts of this book: Stanly’s relationship with his little sister, protective even when he was annoyed with her brattiness Jaxon and Stanly and their friendship the total weirdness of having a skeleton growing in a tree in your backyard. Stanly’s and Jaxon’s friendship is a lovely bit of business: Jaxon has OCD, and Stanly simply accepts Jaxon’s fence-post counting and food pickiness as a part of his friend’s personality. And Stanly wants to take a picture of “Princy”, win a prize, and force his estranged dad to pay attention to his deserted family. Weeeell, as Jack Benny used to say, that’s a lot to take in: a dancing skeleton who may or may not be making Miren’s illness better -or worse. Francine, can actually see the skeleton tree, at least most of the time, and Miren calls the skeleton Princy. Only Stanly, his friend Jaxon, Stanly’s little sister Miren, and the Kyrgyzstani babysitter, Ms. This one falls into the category of really odd and quirky middle grade fiction, but readable, if you can get past the premise: a skeleton emerges from the soil in Stanly’s backyard.

Skeleton tree by kim ventrella