Sparrow Road by Sheila O’Connor is an enchanting, heartwarming story about the power of love, forgiveness and creativity. The summer before seventh grade, Raine O’Rourke’s mother takes a job as a cook and housekeeper at Sparrow Road, a worn-out old former orphanage that houses an eccentric group of artists-in-residence during the summer. Raine can’t figure out why Mama would leave her waitress job, their home with her grandpa, and Milwaukee to spend the summer outside the tiny town of Comfort on a sprawling farm where there’s a silence rule from sun-up to sun-down every day and there’s seemingly nothing to do. To make it even more disconcerting, her mom keeps taking periodic trips into Comfort with Viktor, the curmudgeonly owner of Sparrow Road, and Mama always comes back upset.
As Raine starts to make friends with the artists at Sparrow Road, she realizes that the space and silence give her a chance to explore the world around her. It also opens up the creativity in her mind, allowing her to start writing stories about the children who used to live at Sparrow Road when it was a place where parents who couldn’t care for their children left them in the hope that someone would give them a better life. Eventually Raine discovers the unsettling and life-changing truth about why her mother brought her to Sparrow Road, and with the help of her new friends and her own determined, wholesome spirit, she comes to accept and embrace what she’s longed for her whole life.
Sparrow Road is a gentle, truthful story full of secrets and self discovery. Raine, and the other remarkable characters that inhabit this place of being left behind but also of finding something new, are all loving drawn by O’Connor. With every page, the reader feels the wonder and the possibility that can come from asking “what if” and “what was or what could be” if we just open our eyes and our hearts to all the beautiful possibilities life has to offer.
- Posted by Cori