In After the Fire (Orca $9.95) Melissa's mother is changing her ways. No more guys. No more drinking. She's getting back on her feet and, to save money, she, Melissa and little brother Cody are spending the summer in some old cabin. "Just think,"; says her mother, "Pretty soon we'll be swimming in a real lake...";

But Melissa knows by now that nothing her mother plans ever turns out.

Despite the outhouse, the mosquitoes and the lack of running water, living at the cabin's not bad. For one thing, Melissa gets her own room. Her charismatic mother charms the locals and, surprisingly, puts the run on two beer-toting guys looking for a little fun.

Melissa takes her fair share of responsibility for Cody, watching him in the mornings while her mother struggles with a correspondence course, determined to get her grade twelve. Free for the rest of the day, Melissa is still haunted by the trailer fire two years earlier that they, and her mother's no-good boyfriend, had so narrowly escaped.

One afternoon, on a paddle out to a little island, Melissa meets a mysterious pale-faced girl with long blond hair. Alice is different. She's writing a fantasy novel about changelings and evil fairies. She talks endlessly about a popcorn-throwing, tree-house building older brother and a cupcake-baking mother who's in publishing.

Alice calls Melissa her best friend. Yet there's the intense, almost clinical, interest in Melissa's scarred right hand, the unnecessary and obvious lies, the sudden rages, the blood pact she insists on.

"Do you come in peace or war?"; Alice had once asked.

As Melissa slowly learns the truth about Alice, her idyllic family and her dangerous fantasy world, she has to ask herself the same question.

Becky Citra is a retired elementary school teacher who grew up with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. She gardens, skis and writes at her Bridge Lake, B.C. ranch where she has also written her Max and Ellie historical series and a Greek myth-based time travel series, The Enchanted Theatre, featuring the talking cat Aristotle. 978-1-55469-246-0.

- by Louise Donnelly