• Complex, three-dimensional characters that readers can identify with, who have realistically positive and negative qualities
• Adults are shown working together to rescue children from a dangerous and potentially deadly situation
• Provides opportunities for discussion of difficult topics, such as abuse or evil and how to survive it, what constitutes a family, and how children must sometimes be protected from their own families
• The book’s risks, which could make the book an edgy choice in some teaching situations, include the facts that the novel portrays a violent and manipulative mother who endangers her children physically and psychologically, a distant and uninvolved father, and some adults who choose to ignore that children are in a dangerous situation.
• There are many ways to survive in a dangerous situation. What are some of the ways Matthew, Callie, and Emmy survive?
• Explain why Emmy prayed for Murdoch. Do you think she realized the effect that it would have on her mother? How might their lives have been different if she had just gone to bed that night?
• Matthew describes Nikki as evil. In what ways do you think she exhibited this quality?
• How did Matt and Callie endanger Emmy by trying to protect her? Speculate on how you think Emmy thought about their mother, both before and after they were separated from her.
• Discuss the scene in which Matthew and Callie saw Murdoch for the first time, what characteristics he showed them in their brief interaction with him, and how that meeting changed their lives.
• Compare Matthew’s first view of Murdoch with the way he sees him at the end of the story. What are some of the key events that changed Matthew’s perception of Murdoch?
• Why is it that the people you love the most are able to inflict the most pain on you?
• Discuss how the Walsh children’s lives were different from and similar to the life of the POW in the movie they watched with Murdoch. In what ways were they prisoners?
• Describe how Matthew and Callie felt when no one would help them. How did those refusals affect them mentally and emotionally?
• Speculate on what might have happened if Ben, Bobbie, and Murdoch had intervened sooner. Would Nikki have been able to stop them and retain control of her children, as Ben feared?
• Nikki knew her children very well, and knew exactly what buttons to push to manipulate them. Give several examples of her ability to do this.
• What were some of the reasons behind Nikki’s eccentric and dangerous behavior? What did she gain by acting that way?
• In what ways was Ben a good father? In what ways did he let his children down?
• A number of adults in the book seemed to be afraid of Nikki. What did she do to each of them to make them fear her? What about her frightened them? What about her frightened you?
• There are several turning points in the book where the children’s lives get significantly better or worse. Describe them and discuss what caused them and what the results were.
• Why was it so important for the children to pretend the summer with Murdoch had never happened? What might Nikki have done if they hadn’t?
• Why did Nikki take Emmy away on the day she forced Matthew and Callie to go to church without her? Who was she punishing? Why and how?
• Discuss what Murdoch’s quote means: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Give examples of each of these kinds of people. Can you find examples of these kinds of people in the book?
• Why did Aunt Bobbie and Ben suddenly decide to start protecting the children? What caused them to start acting differently?
• Why did Nikki enjoy tormenting Bobbie, both as a child and an adult? What did she gain? How did it affect her children, Bobbie, and Nikki herself?
• On page 126, Matthew describes the scene in which Murdoch commits himself to helping the children. Why did he make that decision at that point? Speculate on what might have happened to him earlier in his life to cause him to come to such a decision at that moment?
• Matthew says he never really learned to trust Aunt Bobbie. Why not? What prevented that bond from forming? What would have had to happen for Matthew to come to trust her completely?
• Every time Matthew realizes nothing has changed in his family, he gets more and more depressed and hopeless. Discuss how future disappointments might have changed the man he would someday become.
• Compare Matt’s, Murdoch’s, and Bobbie’s lives after Nikki got out of jail to living in enemy territory or an active war zone. How would those situations be physically and emotionally similar to what they had to endure?
• Matthew said he changed in the boatyard when he came face-to-face with Nikki. What caused that change, and why did he say that it was irreversible?
• Discuss Matthew’s queen bee/mosquito theory. How did the change occur? Are there “queen bees” in your life that you might be able to change to “mosquitoes”?
• How would Matthew’s life have changed if he had killed or seriously injured Nikki? How would his sisters’ lives have changed?
• Speculate on what will happen to the Walshes, Murdoch, and Aunt Bobbie in the future, in five years, in ten years. What kinds of people will Matthew, Callie, and Emmy grow up to be? How will their childhood experiences affect them as adults? Will Nikki come back? If she does, what effect will that have on her family and their friends?
Copyright © 2006 by Dr. Joni Richards Bodart and Nancy Werlin. This discussion guide may be used and duplicated freely so long as the copyright information remains affixed.
Turn the page for a sample of Nancy Werlin’s New York Times bestseller
impossible
The Elfin Knight
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She must be a true love of mine
Tell her she’ll sleep in a goose-feather bed
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Tell her I swear she’ll have nothing to dread
She must be a true love of mine
Tell her tomorrow her answer make known
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
What e’er she may say I’ll not leave her alone
She must be a true love of mine
Her answer it came in a week and a day
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
I’m sorry, good sir, I must answer thee nay
I’ll not be a true love of thine
From the sting of my curse she can never be free
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Unless she unravels my riddlings three
She will be a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a magical shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam or needlework
Else she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Else she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to plow it with just a goat’s horn
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And sow it all over with one grain of corn
Else she’ll be a true love of mine
And her daughters forever possessions of mine
prologue
On the evening of Lucy Scarborough’s seventh birthday, after the biggest party the neighborhood had seen since, well, Lucy’s sixth birthday, Lucy got one last unexpected gift. It was a handwritten letter from her mother—her real mother, Miranda. It was not a birthday letter, or at least, not one in the usual sense. It was a letter from the past, written by Miranda to her daughter before Lucy was born, and it had been hidden in the hope that Lucy would find it in time for it to help her.
It would be many years, however, before Lucy would have a prayer o
f understanding this. It was typical of Miranda Scarborough’s terrible luck that her daughter would discover much too early the letter she had left for her. At seven, Lucy barely knew of Miranda’s existence and didn’t miss even the idea of her, because she had a perfectly wonderful substitute mother, and father too. She did not even know that, once upon a time before she was born, her mother had slept for a few months in the same bedroom that today belonged to Lucy.
So, when Lucy found the hidden letter, she was not capable of recognizing who it was from or that it was a letter at all.
Lucy had been in the process of taking possession of the bottom shelf of the built-in bookcase in her bedroom. Previously, the shelf had been crammed tight with books belonging to her foster mother. “Overflow storage,” Soledad Markowitz called it. And recently, she had said to Lucy, “I stuffed my college books in there when we first moved into this house, when your bedroom was a spare room. One day soon I’ll move them down to the basement office so you can have that space for your things.”
One day soon had not yet arrived, however, and so Lucy had decided to take care of it herself. Her birthday—although it had not included the longed-for present of a little black poodle puppy—had brought her many books, including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and a complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia, and she wanted to arrange them all perfectly to wait for the day when she would be old enough to read them by herself.
It was only after Lucy had gotten all of Soledad’s books out of the bookshelf that she noticed the bottom shelf was not quite steady. A moment later, she discovered it could be lifted completely away to reveal three shallow inches of dusty, secret space between the bottom shelf and the floor.
At seventeen, rediscovering the secret space, Lucy would see what she did not see at seven: The nails that originally held the shelf in place had been painstakingly pried out. Then she would understand that Miranda had done this. But at seven, all Lucy knew or cared about was that she had found a secret compartment. An actual secret compartment!
Lucy leaned in to see better, and then felt around inside with both hands. The only thing she found, besides dust, was a sheaf of yellowing paper covered with tiny handwriting.
She pulled the pages out and fanned them in her hands. They were not very exciting to her, although the pages did have a ragged edge, as if they had been ripped out of a book, which was somewhat interesting. But the handwriting on the pages was faded, and it was also so small and cramped and tight that it would have been hard to read even if Lucy was accustomed to cursive. Which she wasn’t.
She had a moment of frustration. Why couldn’t whoever had written the words on the pages have typed them on a computer and printed them out, like a sensible person?
Then she had an idea. It could be that the pages were really old. They might even be from before there were computers. Maybe the pages were ancient, and maybe also the words on them were magical spells. That would explain why they had been hidden. And it would mean that she had found a treasure in her secret compartment after all.
She wanted this to be true for good reason. If Lucy really did have a secret compartment, and magical spells, she already knew what she wanted to do with them.
In fact, it almost felt like an emergency.
Lucy sorted through her pile of birthday presents until she found the one from her oldest friend, Zach Greenfield, who lived next door. It was a Red Sox T-shirt that he had claimed, today at the party, to have bought for her with his own money. On the back, above the number eight, it said “Yastrzemski.” Every Red Sox fan in Boston knew the name, even if they weren’t sure how to spell it. Lucy had been touched at first with the gift. Yaz was one of the players from the past that Zach just loved.
The problem was that the T-shirt was an adult medium, too big for Lucy to wear, which meant Zach wasn’t really paying attention to her, only pretending to. Or even, possibly, that he had gotten it for himself (Zach wore his T-shirts large), and decided to give it to Lucy at the last minute, because he’d forgotten about her birthday.
Lucy, despite her willingness to believe in magic spells, was mostly a realistic child, so she believed this was probably the case. Lately, Zach had been busy with his other friends, the ones who were closer to his age, which was nine and a half. He had not played with Lucy much at all, and at school, he hardly even said hello.
Which hurt.
Filled with a sense of magical possibility, Lucy folded the T-shirt carefully and laid it down on the floor inside the secret compartment. Then she picked up the sheaf of pages with the cramped writing on them, and, by concentrating, managed to sound out a sentence located about halfway down the first page. The ink in which this sentence had been written was a little darker than the rest, as if the person writing had pressed down hard with the pen. Lucy decided that this sentence would be enough to start the magic. It would have to be, because she wasn’t up to reading more. And, she told herself, it wasn’t cheating to include only one sentence, because it wasn’t as if it was a short sentence.
She read it out loud, softly, not sure she was pronouncing all the words correctly, and quite sure she didn’t understand them.
“I look in the mirror now and see my mother and I am so afraid you will end like us: doomed, cursed . . . all sorts of melodramatic, ridiculous, but true things.”
Saying the sentence out loud gave Lucy a distinctly unpleasant feeling. She had an impulse to call her foster parents to look at the pages and the secret compartment.
Everything would have been different if Lucy had done that.
Or possibly not.
She didn’t, in the end. She wanted the magic too badly. Instead, Lucy added her own magic words: “Abracadabra! Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Yastrzemski!” She tucked the handwritten pages into a fold of the T-shirt inside the secret compartment. Then she put the shelf back in place on top, and arranged her new books on the shelf just as she had originally planned.
The magic spell would work, she knew it. Even if she had not said the words right, or had selected the wrong sentence to read out loud, the magical pages were inside the T-shirt, touching it, so they would do their job. Plus, she would be patient. She would not expect Zach to change back overnight. But once she was old enough to wear the T-shirt he had given her, Zach would remember to be her friend again.
She planned how she would check the magic compartment on her next birthday. She would try on the shirt. Maybe by then, she would be able to read the entire magical spell.
But by the time her eighth birthday arrived, Lucy had forgotten all about the secret compartment and the T-shirt, and about the mysterious papers with the faded, tight, urgent handwriting. She would be seventeen, and in deep trouble, before she remembered.
chapter one
Ten minutes after the last class of the day, Lucy got a text message from her best friend, Sarah Hebert. “Need u,” it said.
“2 mins,” Lucy texted back. She sighed. Then she hefted her backpack and headed to the girls’ locker room, where, she knew, Sarah would be. Nothing and nobody, not even Jeff Mundy, got in the way of track practice.
Because of course this problem of Sarah’s would be about Jeff. Lucy had seen him at lunch period, leaning flirtatiously over an adorable freshman girl. Maybe this time Sarah would have had it with him for good. Lucy hoped so.
But still, it was delicate. And it wasn’t like Lucy had a lot of experience to guide her friend with. Or any, really, if you didn’t count Gray Spencer, which you couldn’t, not yet, anyway. No, she didn’t have experience, Lucy thought fiercely, but she did have years of understanding about who, exactly, Sarah was and what made her happy. And also, frankly, some basic common sense.
Which Sarah had totally lost.
Lucy found Sarah already changed and sitting on a bench by Lucy’s locker. “Are you all right?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah. It’s just—it’s not Jeff, it’s me. I’m the one with the problem.” Sarah made a little motion with her hand. “But now we have to
go to practice.”
Lucy put an arm around her and squeezed. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk later if you want.”
Sarah nodded and tried to smile.
Lucy turned to change. Then they walked out together toward the school’s track, moving to the infield to stretch. Lucy’s practice routine as a hurdler was different from Sarah’s distance training, but they always did as much together as they could.
When they were side by side doing leg stretches, Sarah was finally able to talk. Lucy listened patiently to all of it, even the parts she’d heard many times before. But when Sarah said, “We both agreed from the start that we weren’t serious and Jeff’s right that it truly is my problem that I’m so jealous, not his, because he’s not doing anything wrong,” Lucy couldn’t help herself. She cut in.
“Sarah, please. It’s not a problem that you want something more serious than Jeff does. There’s nothing wrong with you that you want that! And there’s also nothing wrong that he doesn’t. Can’t you see? It’s just that you’re fundamentally incompatible. You should just say so and move on.”