When I was a kid, I lived in the corner house on a crossroads of an old neighborhood. Diagonally from me, behind the house, one street west, was a Mom & Pop grocery store. One street east and two and a half blocks north was my Grandma's house. If I walked into the middle of the street and looked due east I could see my elementary school, the same school my Dad and his brother and sisters attended when they were kids. But the most important location was three streets east and two and a half blocks south.
The library.
When I was a kid, I remember my Dad started having part of the summer off and he'd plan day trips to the library. We'd have breakfast, get our bags ready for our books and set off. I remember we would choose a different route sometimes, skip a turn and go longer down a street, things like that, but we would always end up walking through a street that felt like tunnel of trees and it would be one more left and the library was on our right. We'd get water at the fountain and my Dad would leave us in the kid's section, saying to choose some good books, come find him when we were ready and then we would go home for lunch. It would be somewhere between three or four hours to sit in the library, searching the shelves and choosing the best spot to settle in and read. I'd pull books off the shelves, trying to find something, changing my mind every trip about what I wanted to read. I'd read everything by Mary Downing Hahn, Betty Ren Wright, Lynn Reid Banks, James Howe, Bruce Coville. Wandering around, I remembering finding a biography on Louisa May Alcott that I'd never seen before and I'd found several shelves consisting of every Oz book by Baum that the library had collected for decades.
Some books were new, others were so old they creaked when they opened and laid splayed out without my having to hold the book, the smell of old paper lingering for hours after I put the book away, the pages so yellowed they were almost brown. I made it a point to try anything I found but back in the 90s, it wasn't easy for me to find the right book I was really looking for, something with the right balance of real world situations and a little bit magic and mystery. I was too anxious to try asking at the public library for help finding a book and my school librarian had too many kids to focus on. Eventually I moved on, finding great mysteries to read, science fiction and fantasy and horror while reading the assigned books for school. But, ever since then, I have wandered into the middle grade section of various bookstores, still looking for that right book, that book that childhood me was searching for so long to find. That's what I was doing, maybe a dozen years ago now, when a particular title caught my eye.
The Boneshaker by Kate Milford.
I picked it up, a paperback, and noticed The Broken Lands, a hardcover, right next to it. I stared at the artwork, my eyes moving this way and that, seeing things here and there that would make sense once you'd read the book but I didn't know that then. All I knew is that the artwork called to me, the synopsis hooked my attention. I took them home and started to read and it was then that I felt that I'd done it. I'd found a book that I would have ADORED when I was a kid. My whole personality would have been that book. I would have carried it around everywhere, reading it so many times, memorizing passages just from the act of reading it time and time again. I've bought and read every Kate Milford book since. I'm planning to read them to my kids when they're older. Because some of that need to find brilliant middle grade books is to make sure my kids don't have trouble finding books that appeal to them. These are the books I wish I'd found, so now I have them to hand to my kids when they want to try them and I can't wait to give them Kate Milford's books. Milford writes kids that feel real, that have trials to overcome and a world that they have to look at just a little bit differently to solve the mystery. The kids are treated with respect, never looked down on, or dismissed. The adults in these books pay attention to the kids, they listen, they try to learn. All together, each book has been lovely, and brilliant, and astounding. I LOVE Kate Milford books so when I saw that there was a new book, Rialto, ready to be published, my heart leapt into my throat. I had to read this book, end of story, and you want to know the best part?
It was magnificent.
Rialto starts with following Ivy and Dahlia Vicar, on their way to Rialto, Missouri for a family vacation to visit friends. The sisters are currently a little at odds with each other. Dahlia is dealing with anxiety and is looking forward to a new destination to try for their trip, which comes with an abandoned amusement park that their Mom is interested in researching for a book. Ivy is trying to understand how to be the big sister that Dahlia needs while longing for the times when they were younger and the traditions that they had in the past. Once they arrive in Rialto, it is obvious that things are going to be very different for their vacation. The town looks like it was swallowed by a forest and stories say that the town woke up one morning to find that the trees had grown up around them overnight. While driving through the town Dahlia spots a giraffe with antlers and after meeting Remy and his family, who own the house they will be staying in, she sees a leopard with wings through the window. Remy and his family inherited the house from their Aunt Jess, who has left bequests for Remy to give to her friends now that she has gone. Remy decides to ask Ivy and Dahlia to help with the bequests and the trio start to realize that there is a mystery to solve about the town that goes back to when Rialto was still open to visitors. In order to solve the mystery, they must believe in the magic that seems to be in the town that was swallowed by a forest and has strange creatures roaming its streets.
There is so much in this book, so many things that make it yet another brilliant Milford book and yet more at the same time. Greenglass House has held the title of favorite Kate Milford book for quite some time but Rialto might have just knocked it from its place of honor. Ivy felt so familiar to me as a kid who loved to solve riddles and mysteries and her trying to understand her sibling who has started to change in ways that are difficult for Ivy to accept. As soon as it was revealed that Dahlia had anxiety and was seeing a therapist, I was completely invested in these girls and their story. I loved the things that Milford added for Dahlia, the fact that she had methods to deal with her anxiety when she was out in public, the fact that she needed to retreat to her room and have time on her own to deal with the way the day unfolded and how it affected her sense of well-being. I loved that Ivy had a hard time accepting this new normal, how she wanted to cling to the way things were and how she needed her parents to help her with understanding how to be what Dahlia needed.
I also LOVED the fact that Mr. Vicar had his own social issues that made him able to understand Dahlia and how the fact that he had his own issues meant that Mrs. Vicar knew what to do to help both of them or when to give them space. This was a family unit that was in tune with each other. It was believable that these parents made an effort to understand and help their kids and that Ivy and Dahlia never doubted the support they would get from their parents. When Dahlia started to see the amazing things hiding in Rialto, I was excited to see how quickly her logic had her reasoning the existence of magic and how she made the decision to believe that there was something more to the town. It made sense that Dahlia would be the character to get the ball rolling for the magic of the book and I loved how Ivy, in trying to support her sister, was brought along for the ride and evolved as well.
On the other side of the characters is Remy, his parents and everyone else in town. These are the characters that know the ins and outs of Rialto, they've grown up in the town and some of them know everything about the town. Remy is the perfect character to bring Ivy and Dahlia into the world of Rialto. He knows SOME of the truth but he knows things in the sense of stories that have been handed down, the legends that make up the place. He knows some things, he's seen the animals that Dahlia has seen, but at the same time he's been kept at a distance in the town because he's not a resident. His belief in the sisters to be the best companions for him and his quest endeared him to me. I loved how quickly he became Ivy's number one supporter in asking her for help with the clues and knowing how she could solve the mystery. Remy's parents were also supportive and I liked how they defended the kids as they worked on the mystery. There's a scene with Bailey, Remy's dad, and some of the residents of the town where he backed up the circumstances up to that point and how the kids were involved that just made me want to stand up and applaud. He had no doubt in his son and his son's new friends and he was in their corner and I loved every parent in this book, seriously, the reveals about the town and how these adults helped the kids just made me want to be just like those parents. I'm too old to say I want to be Ivy and Dahlia when I grow up but I'll settle for being any combination of the four parents in this book.
The mystery was engrossing from the start. The idea that this town had been swallowed up by a forest and that no one was able to enter the Rialto amusement park again was so intriguing, I wanted to know everything about it. Which is good because Milford does not skimp on the world development, on the stories that surround the town and the people that are in this place. I've tried to think if there was anything I had questions about once the book was done but I honestly believe that anything and everything I questioned or wanted to know was revealed and answered over the course of the book. It's a sign of great writing and a great story when I can get to the end of the book and feel like the whole thing was complete. If there is ever a story that can branch of from something in this book though, I will try my hardest to be first in line to read it. The mystery itself deserves to be discovered by the readers that try this book so I won't delve further into it. Once the reveals are made, I was a self-declared number one fan of this book. I'm older, so I had my suspicions about the reveals that ended up being right but it still felt perfect with everything the book gives to the reader.
I have loved every Kate Milford book I have read. I have a signed copy of The Left-Handed Fate and a numbered and signed copy of Bluecrowne. I have waited years for another Kate Milford book and I will continue to look for a new book every year until we readers are given another book. I am a fan for life of Kate Milford's books and I hope that more readers find their way to these novels. I'm counting down the days until my kids are old enough to sit and listen and imagine while I read them these books.
Rating on my scale: 10 STARS!! This is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I know when I sit down with a Kate Milford book, I will be enthralled and Rialto did not disappoint. Read this book if you like mysteries with magic and characters that can change and make changes and defeat evils and triumph.
My thanks to Netgalley, HarperCollins Children's Books and Kate Milford the eARC of this book in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.
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