2015 book 166

Corey Ann Haydu's Rules for Stealing Stars
In this middle-grade novel, four sisters dealing with a mentally ill mother discover that the closets in their house each have a sort of magic, and the youngest sister--the narrator, who longs to be accepted by her older sisters as an equal--has the most magic of all. There's also a whole fairy-tale thing woven through (their father is a folklore professor). In general, I liked this a lot, though sometimes the protagonist's decisions didn't make a lot of sense and seemed to be just to build plot. And I think some of this would be kind of scary for younger kids (I found a lot of it to be somewhat creepy). But the stuff with the sisters and their relationships was pretty well-done, and the writing is strong. B/B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.