ALA Booklist

Gr. 4-7. When her parents go out of town, a miscommunication leaves Mandy home alone for an entire weekend. Not that she cares much anyway. Since losing her vivacious twin sister, Angel, nearly a year ago, the 11-year-old drifts through the days, aching for her dead sister's company. But when someone breaks into the house and steals food, Mandy snaps into action and investigates what might be going on, drawing courage from how she thinks Angel would have acted. Soon she discovers teenage Zander and his toddler brother, squatting in an abandoned cottage up the road. The older boy claims to be fleeing two would-be kidnappers who plan to hold the little one for ransom; it's up to Mandy to determine the truth behind his claims. The suspense mounts to a desperate climax before all is resolved safely. An introspective page-turner by the late Roberts, a three-time Edgar Award winner.

Horn Book

Home alone for a weekend and still mourning her twin sister's accidental death a year ago, eleven-year-old Mandy finds herself hiding two fugitive children and foiling a kidnapping. The suspenseful, subtly creepy plot relies heavily on coincidence, but Roberts writes convincingly of a grieving child who must adjust to making decisions without the help of her twin.

Kirkus Reviews

Eleven-year-old Mandy has been left behind in an empty house; each member of the family thinks she's with another. But this kind of aloneness is nothing compared to the abandonment she feels at the loss of her sister Angel, who died a year ago. She has always believed that Angel was smarter and prettier, even though they were identical twins. During this eventful weekend, Mandy meets Zander and his little brother who are hiding from would-be kidnappers. As the adventure unfolds, she questions her ability to cope and wonders what her sister would do. As she gains confidence, she realizes that her memories of Angel will always be there to guide and reassure her. If Roberts's plot is a bit convoluted and contrived, she has created a sweet, sensitive child dealing with issues of grief and loss in her own way. Published posthumously. (Fiction. 8-12)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

The late Roberts's final book does not seem up to her previous high standards, yet it is a pageturner nonetheless. Eleven-year-old Mandy, part of a large and busy family, is invited by her various older siblings to come along with each of them and their friends for Labor Day weekend (her parents are away celebrating their anniversary). But not having committed to any of them, she finds that everyone has dispersed and inadvertently left without her. For Mandy, this is an opportunity to make herself take some risks on her own, the kind that Angel, her twin sister who died the year before, was always the first to take. The first third of the book progresses rather slowly, absent of the author's usual dialogue, but when Mandy finds two young runaways in the woods, the pace picks up. Mandy must decide whom she can trust, and how best to keep them all safe from would-be kidnappers and possible killers. Roberts successfully portrays Mandy's grief for her lost twin and her alarm as a suspicion takes hold that someone else has been in the house. Even though the denouement may feel anticlimactic and somewhat contrived, the heroine's wavering about what to do with the two boys is genuine, and in the end, she is able to act decisively when necessary. Ages 8-12.

School Library Journal

Gr 5-7-Feeling as though the rest of her large family has moved on, 11-year-old Mandy continues to struggle with the death of her twin. Left alone in her house over a long weekend, she pretends that Angel is still with her, but it "no longer worked to pretend anything beautiful, or exciting, or magical. Without Angel to share, Mandy felt broken, destroyed." Midway through the weekend, she discovers a runaway boy, Zander, who has broken into her house. Fugitives from a kidnapping plot, the teen and his toddler brother seek her help, and now she, and not her daring twin, must become courageous and independent. While the story seems slight, Roberts's characters possess an emotional immediacy that is hard to deny. Mandy and Zander face troubles that leave them incomplete, and the drama of outthinking and outrunning the kidnappers imbues what might otherwise be just an "issue book" with page-turning pacing. Give this quick read to girls not quite ready for Caroline Cooney or Lurlene McDaniel.-Caitlin Augusta, The Darien Library, CT Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.