Cobwebs

By Karen Romano Young.

I really enjoyed this book; highly recommended. Go read it!

The dimensions of kind of odd so that even though it's 380-some pages, it still seems small and short. I read through it in about two and a half hours, that's for sure. Despite the cover (the reddish purple reminds me of Sunshine's cover), it definitely isn't horror. Unless you're arachnophobic. It's about a girl named Nancy growing up in New York, sort of.

Nancy's family is from an odd ethnic background, even for New York. Her father lives on a rooftop and works as a roofer. Her mother lives below ground and weaves incessantly as the days get long. Her grandfather can't seem to stop betting on horse races, and her grandmother tells stories that get inside her head and make her do crazy things. The problem is, they're all telling her she needs to grow up and being really cryptic about what they expect to happen to her. Why? (Even after finishing it, it isn't really clear why.)

Definitely a cool, cute book. I picked it up, was reminded of Firefly Cloak by the flap, and started reading. It is definitely a coming-of-age type story, only with spiders. Or humans. Or angels. (I know, it's corny.) You really aren't sure for the first few chapters exactly what they are, although angels is pretty much out of the picture.

Should I be negative? There are a few spots where it's unclear exactly what happens, especially at the end. The plot might be pretty ordinary if none of the characters had any suspiciously spidery traits. The dark cover with the silk coming from the hand make it look like a horror book, although actually Nancy, who's afraid of heights but being pressured by her parents to climb, does wish she could spin silk like a spider. There was nothing else that bothered me too much.