Secrets are burdens, as Vancouver crown prosecutor Gail Banning reveals with her highly original plot for Out on a Limb (Key Porter $11.95). When Rosie's PhD-seeking parents are forced to vacate their apartment building, they find a clause in a long-forgotten will that reveals their estranged great-aunt Lydia inherited everything from a rich relative's estate except a large treehouse. So up they go. At first the family's bohemian digs in the tree are just fine. Who needs electricity and running water when you can see for miles? But when their idyllic summer ends, and Rosie and her sister Tilly are obliged to attend an upscale school in the neighborhood, Rosie can't risk revealing the treehouse to her snobby classmates. Rosie starts telling lies--and those lies become far more troubling to her than poverty. 978-1-55470-012-7

[BCBW 2008] "Kidlit"