Set in the harsh mining outback of Australia during the Depression, Hartnett's (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Sleeping Dogs) startling coming-of-age story combines narrator Harper Flute's grindingly realistic account of a family mired in poverty with a more surreal tale of her younger brother, Tin. Gifted with an uncanny ability to dig through the earth, Tin creates his own subterranean world that provides him both escape and a link to his struggling family. Through Harper, Hartnett captures the humanity of her spirited, slightly eccentric and then nearly broken characters as they survive a horrifying series of losses, only to be saved by a gift from the rarely seen Tin. In telling these events, Harper maintains a convincing and lyrical narrative voice, from her first appearance as a seven-year-old until the climax, when she approaches adulthood. She offers insightful and increasingly sophisticated observations: "As I grew older… I was starting to realize the world is not one place, but two, and that you move from one to the other only with years." The haunting eloquence and dreamlike weaving of the mythic and the mundane invite comparisons to the works of David Almond. Ages 14-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

Harper Flute's brother, Tin, is a digger, and she tells his story. After Tin digs his way out of a mudslide, he begins to tunnel under the Flute house, eventually building a vast network of underground passageways. When one of his tunnels collapses, the boy is unscathed, but the family shanty is destroyed. The Depression brings further misfortune to the Flutes, as the rabbit pelts Da sells in their Australian town become worthless. Although the family rarely sees Tin after their home is gone, his underground digging is a constant amid the poverty, alcoholism, death, and rape to which Harper bears witness. Despite the narrator's youth (Harper is a preteen for most of the book) and the complex narrative, teens will appreciate the demanding but rewarding story. As in Louis Sachar's Holes (1998), the magic here is in the digging. Tin's endless search for security and comfort in the dark, moist walls of the dirt mirrors Harper's own emotional digging, as she tries to find a place on the world's surface where she might feel the security she experienced before the collapse of the family's shanty. This coming-of-age story with allegorical overtones will burrow into young people's deepest hopes and fears, shining light in the darkest inner rooms.

Harper Flute narrates her family's saga, which appears destined for grimness even before Tin, the middle boy, discovers an unnatural penchant for digging and begins tunneling out a subterranean realm beneath his family's shanty. Tin is a primitive who, by living below the surface, achieves an almost mythic power in this odd, unsettling novel set in Depression-era Australia.

<p>Hartnett (Princes, 1998, etc.) tells a fantastic tale of an ordinary life during the Great Depression. Narrator Harper Flute begins with her brother Tin, "born on a Thursday, and so fated to his wanderings," and about the day he went underground. Having a baby brother who burrows beneath her family's ill-fated plot of land doesn't seem odd to her young eyes. Neither does her father, who, permanently "changed" by the Great War, has taken a farm plot though he knows nothing about farming, and squanders his inheritance on three breeding cows just as the stock market collapses. Harper's voice is precise, charged, and involved. Her nearsighted view broadens as the reader watches her grow. Her bossy older sister becomes a frustrated romantic, and her helpful older brother gives up on the family he's struggled to hold together through his adolescence. Tin disappears more and more from sight, becoming an allegorical and literal underpinning of the family. Hartnett's narrative stands on edge between the mundane and the stuff of legend, as Harper's childhood unfolds precisely and peculiarly towards the event that changes her family forever. Dark, unusual, familiar, and slightly miraculousa"Hartnett's story is not for everyone, but it leaves its mark. (Fiction. YA)</p>

Gr 7 Up-This novel from Australia details the hardscrabble life of a rural family during the Great Depression. When the story begins, Harper, the narrator, is seven. She relates the many misfortunes that have befallen her family. The oddest member of the clan is her little brother, Tin, who gets temporarily buried in a collapsed creek bank when he is only four. After this incident, burrowing and tunneling become a way of life. The family sees him only occasionally as he gradually turns into a subterranean feral creature, hardly recognizable as human. This surreal strand of plot in an otherwise gritty, realistic story is jarring for a while, but eventually it becomes an accepted piece of the family saga. The father is often mean-spirited and ineffectual when it comes to caring for his loved ones, but is not a stereotypical brute. The mother's character is less well defined, but she comes across as long suffering and protective of her brood. A wealthy neighbor's ulterior motive in hiring the oldest daughter as a servant seems to escape everyone's notice until it is too late. The story begins slowly, gathers momentum, and builds to a page-turning climax. Along the way, the family's house collapses into Tin's antlike tunnels below, one child is the victim of a tragic accident, and Tin, ever watchful, metes out his own terrible justice when his sister Audrey is threatened. This title may be a hard sell due to its strangeness, but readers who stick with it will be rewarded with a unique and fascinating experience.-Bruce Anne Shook, Mendenhall Middle School, Greensboro, NC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.