This is a sequel but you'd never know it. I expected to be playing catch-up with the characters and story line--I'm a little gun shy after The High King. This stands alone from the first page though. I really relate to the characters in this book. They feel real to me, especially Grandma Dowdel. I have family members who talk just like her!

"How about some supper? My stomach's flapping against my backbone," she said. "If I don't eat, I get cranky."

"Cold?" she said. "It doesn't get cold anymore. The climate's changed. When I was a girl, we had to walk in our sleep to keep from freezing to death."

"The entire student body was to be the chorus, though half of us couldn't carry a tune it it had handles."

"Grandma, it's a school night. I need my sleep." "Sleep? You'll sleep your life away and rot in the bed. You better pull on two pair of socks under your galoshes."

"She is a plain woman, but there is poetry in her pastry."

"The winters were colder back then too, weren't they Grandma?" "People starved to death because their jaws froze shut," she said.

"She was skinnier than a toothpick with termites."

"Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh, I don't know," Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck."

"It's a better climate than New York," said Grandma, who'd never been there. "It's the healthiest spot in Illinois. We had to hang a man to start the graveyard."

"Were tornadoes worse when you were a girl?" I asked to test her. She waved me away. "What we had today was a light breeze. When I was a girl, a tornado hit an outdoor band concert. It twisted the tuba player four feet into the ground like a corkscrew before we could get help to him."