Saturday Review: “Emergency Salad Dressing,” a review by Wendy Tilley of Ena Jones’s Six Feet Below Zero (2021), forthcoming in NCLR Online Fall 2024.
Ena Jones’s book starts with the Spreen siblings, “twelve-year-old Marigold ‘Rosie’ Spreen and her brother Baker Spreen, her junior by a year,” whose parents passed away three years before their move-in with Great Grammy. The story quickly develops from there, as Jones brings readers on the journey of death, grief, mystery, illness, and growing up. Tilley writes, “This gets to the heart of one of the themes of the novel: learning to identify and deal with tough emotions.”
The reviewer adds, “On top of the dead great-grandmother, the evil grandmother, and the absent aunt, there is a mysterious grave on the property, a nosy, but friendly, neighbor Rosie’s age who keeps showing up at all the wrong times, a sick puppy, falling trees, lots of homework, lots of food, and a constant barrage of phone calls, emails, and knocks at the door.” Jones’s book perfectly weaves in elements of mystery and real-world elements of life for young children.
Even with the fast pace and topic of death, Tilley praises it as “an imminently entertaining, can’t-put-it-down experience – a good reason to read a book at any age,” she reminds us.
Read the entire review here while you wait for the release of NCLR Online Fall 2024 later this month! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
