The power and danger of dreams, and their threat to reality if they become more enticing than the actual world is creatively explored in Flora and Anthea's story. Following the death of her parents Anthea moves in with Flora's family, and the two cousins begin to share sinister nightly dreams. Anthea must decide whether to fill the dangerous spaces around her with the warm, but imperfect, reality of her cousin's family, or to remain isolated in her grief and guilt. Mahy's fluent prose expertly captures the illusory bizarreness of dreams and the down-to-earth realities of family relationships. (Ages 10-13)

Two cousins living in a house that is haunted are drawn at night into a dream world which threatens to overwhelm their real world.