KIDS Summer Reading Classics:
Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away Lake
Elizabeth Enright, the only child of divorced parents, wrote one of the best, and most delightful, family novels in American children’s literature, Gone-Away Lake.
In Gone-Away Lake, city kids escape to the country to spend time with their cousin. Together they explore the landscape discovering an abandoned resort. A common childhood fantasy, often realized literally in kids’ clumsy construction of tree and club houses, is the idea of a secret kid place out of sight and hearing of parents. So much better than a club house is an entire Victorian summer resort community, forsaken and abandoned, and filled with who knows what hidden treasures?
Enright, the daughter of a political cartoonist and a magazine illustrator, and niece of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was a talented visual artist who later discovered that she was an even more gifted writer. Her books are filled with engaging characters, vivid descriptions, gentle humor, and realistic family warmth that never dips into sentimentality.
Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away Lake are wonderful, entertaining summer reads. And if your son or daughter enjoys Gone-Away Lake, borrow Enright’s series of books about the Melendy family from your neighborhood library—The Saturdays, The Four Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two. The Melendy kids— a motherless family of five— are smart, talented, interesting,and interested. Like Frank Capra’s movie You Can’t Take It With You, Enright’s Melendy family series bubble with a quirky joie de vivre that is contagious. All Enright's books are available in paperback editions. –M.B.B.
