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The Beastie of Brambly Bald might be my favorite Tree Street Kids Series book so far. I loved the North Carolina setting, and I found the complex family dynamics to be compelling. This is an excellent book about family, forgiveness, and home.
I have really enjoyed reading Tree Street Kids books this summer. Amanda Cleary Eastep is an author who respects our middle-grade readers and gives them interesting stories with substance and real challenges while also attending to their hearts.
Who among us hasn’t heard of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot? So many communities have a beloved local legend—a mysterious creature who seems to live forever, with sightings passed down from one generation to the next. These stories offer young adventurers just the sort of mystery that stirs the imagination. For the Tree Street Kids, it’s the Beastie of Brambly Bald.
In this fifth installment in the Tree Street Kids series, it is late fall and our Tree Street friends are setting out on an entirely new adventure to North Carolina. Jack’s mom informs the family that it is important that they make the drive to her childhood home of Brambly Bald, North Carolina. Jack and Midge are confused and anxious. While they have shared a home and life with their dad’s parents, they have very few memories of their mom’s parents. And, it has been years since they have traveled to Brambly Bald.
Because it wouldn’t be The Tree Street Kids without at least some of the gang, Ellison and Roger tag along on the road trip. Ruthie, however, stays home to spend Thanksgiving with her estranged mom. When the gang gets to North Carolina, they are shocked to discover that Jack’s grandparents have taken in a foster child about the same age as them. At first, they are not very excited about her, but they do come to appreciate her and even love her.
This story invites young readers into hard questions about what it means to be family, how to forgive someone who has hurt you, and what love really looks like. Like life, not everything is perfect. But, where there is Christ, there is hope. And, our friends do a lot of hoping.
I continue to be particularly impressed with how Eastep draws characters who are true to life with real-life problems. When we interviewed Gary D. Schmidt, he talked about why he wrote Orbiting Jupiter. He explained that while working with kids in prison, they told him that there weren’t any stories about kids like them. That comment stuck with me for years. While the content in this book is much more gentle than Schmdit’s book, Eastep does a lovely job of telling stories that modern readers will understand without coloring it with the junk that normally comes from stories like that. I so appreciate that about her.
I would love to recommend this book to middle-grade readers who already love the Tree Street Kids. Also, I would recommend this book to any readers who like mysteries. And I think this one would make a good book club option.