By the end, they have discovered the desire to shape their own destinies. All that really inspires them to real action is The Secret – which explains a lot about their apparent passivity. While Cath is down-to-earth and practical, Fancy and Marbie are more nebulous and fey, drifting through their lives and wondering (or grumbling) at where the winds of chance blow them. Zing (Maudie) playing a more distant but crucial role as well. These young women – Cath, Fancy, Marbie, and Listen – are the heart and soul of the story, with Mrs. She follows these instructions with bemusement and then a kind of desperation – after all, the book promises to “mend your broken heart.” Listen’s heart has been broken by her group of friends, who have turned on her now that they’re all at a new school.Īnd finally there is Cath Murphy, a young and peculiarly lucky 2nd-grade teacher, whose love affair with a fellow teacher at first seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the story, except that she is Fancy’s daughter Cassie’s teacher. Meanwhile, Nathaniel’s daughter Listen has found a handmade book that cheerfully exhorts her to follow easy but very concise instructions that will lead to such results as someone finding something unexpected in a washing machine.

Zing, their two 30-something daughters Marbie and Fancy, Fancy’s husband Radcliffe, and Marbie’s boyfriend Nathaniel) has an unusual and all-consuming Secret. To reveal too much would detract from the pleasure of this tale, so I will only say that the Zing family (Mr. The plot starts out scattered and complicated, but the disparate threads all lead the reader to the tightly knitted heart of the center. But most of the characters are young women in their 20s and 30s, who are dealing with jobs, relationships, children, and other grown-up preoccupations.

Sure, there’s a Junior High School girl named Listen, whose spells may or may not be having some intriguing and unexpected effects on the people around her.

To my initial uneasiness but then vast delight, this book quickly began soaring away from any possibility of pinning it down into a category or genre. Levine imprint of Scholastic and featuring a 12-year-old girl who finds a book of spells. When I first picked up The Spell Book of Listen Taylor by Jaclyn Moriarty, it seemed to be quite obviously YA, published as it is by the Arthur A.

The spell book of listen taylor