false 3 0 false false Sun Sep 13 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 13 21:57:38 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 13 22:18:32 -0700 2009
Complicating matters is Calli's silence. Since witnessing a family tragedy three years earlier, the little girl has been mute. The stories of Calli's silence, her family's history, her friendship with Petra, and Petra's roots, all emerge as author Heather Gudenkauf leaps from narrator to narrator for 373 pages.

It's an exciting adventure story, and Gudenkauf writes well. Each character's voice is nearly identical to the others', unfortunately, a common weakness in books written with shifting viewpoints. Cleverly, at least, the mute little girl never thinks in the first person like every one else in the book. Her stories are all recounted in third person. As for the rest of them -- I don't buy the theory that a 12-year-old boy, his mother, a professor, and a law enforcement officer would all have similar thought patterns, similar ways of thinking.]]>