Note: I received a copy of Binny in Secret from the publisher for review consideration.
Oh frabjous day when Hilary McKay has a new book! Hilary McKay — in case you have not heard me sing her praises in the past — is a British children’s writer who should be much more famous than she is. She writes the kind of old-fashioned children-doing-adventures books you loved as a kid, like Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet or, more recently, Jeanne Birdsall’s Penderwicks books; but with more carefully-drawn family dynamics than the former and more humor than the latter.
Binny in Secret, the follow-up to Binny for Short, sees twelve-year-old Binny once again displaced from house and home. She and her mother, her teenage sister Clem, and her wriggly, personable little brother James, are forced out of their home by a massive storm. The new home is far from everything familiar, and Binny inadvertently becomes the enemy of the landlady’s daughter, and what is more, there are Creatures.
Where the Cassons are completely tangled up in each other, each Cornwallis is more of a discrete unit. Binny is especially solitary: Separated from her ?best?friend Gareth, and unexpectedly the enemy of one of the most popular girls in her new school, she spends a lot of her time alone. This limits what Hilary McKay is best with, family relations.
LUCKILY: To fill the tragic lack of family relations in Binny’s storyline, alternating chapters include the story of the family who lived in Binny’s house in the 1910s, three cousins and the museum of natural history they’re constructing. These chapters are a madly poignant counterpoint to the humor of Binny’s hunt for [redacted because it’s an incredibly charming spoiler].
Seriously: Hilary McKay. Look into it. She does not get the love she deserves and would that I could singlehandedly correct this problem. Let’s make Hilary McKay as famous as she deserves to be, people! Together we can!
(I really love Hilary McKay.)