Fing has moved with her family into a house called Nine Open Arms. Located at the end of a lonely road outside a village near the Dutch border with Germany, it’s the most recent in a series of places they’ve lived since her mother’s death. Fing and her sisters, spitfire Muhlke and timid Jess, spend time together while their four older brothers help their dreamer of a father with his latest, well-intentioned moneymaking plan. The girls trek to the village to attend school, and ponder their home’s oddities, including an extraordinary carved bed with a headboard that looks like a tombstone in one of the cellars, a front door knee-height off the ground, and prodigious leaking with the first heavy rain. Later they discover Oompah, a mute, homeless tailor, has set up house in the hedgerow. It turns out the children’s maternal grandmother Oma Mei, who oversees the family’s life with stern affection, knows the history of Nine Open Arms but is reluctant to reveal it. When she finally tells the story of Charley Bottletop and Nienevee, the Traveler girl who captured his heart, a tale of pain and love and prejudice and pride, it seems like it was fated that Fing’s family come to Nine Open Arms, to release the house from the past, and to plant themselves firmly in ground where they can grow. In a story told with humor and great affection, Fing discovers that Nine Open Arms, like her family, is marked by displacement and determination, loss and, above all, love and hope. (Ages 10–13)

At the edge of a small village in the Netherlands in 1937, three sisters and their eccentric family move to a house with a mysterious past. Storytelling is what their Oma does best. As her family stories unfold, familiar people and a ghost story intersect, and the history of the house becomes clear. This lovely, layered novel, with snippets of dialect and rich language, is the first in a duo of books about a poor family with dreams of a better life, and is followed by Fing's War.

2015 Batchelder Honor Award.

The award-winning author lives in the Netherlands.

Netherlands. Originally published in Dutch as Negen Open Armen by Emmanuel Querido Publishers in 2004. English translation by John Nieuwenhuizen published in the United States by Enchanted Lion Books in 2014.

At the end of the world, near the border with Germany, stands a house as long as nine open arms. Half hidden behind trees and shrubs rises a wide brick wall, topped with two attic windows, each no bigger than a dishcloth. The walls have been whitewashed and the wooden floor is bare, as if the house is waiting. Waiting for someone to move in. '.. It is the summer of 1937, and it hasn't rained for seven weeks when eleven-year-old Fing and her family of nine move into Nine Open Arms, along with their handcart of meagre belongings. 'The Dad' is a man who does all kinds of jobs and none of them well, while Oma Mei courageously holds everything together, including the family's history in her Crocodile bag full of pictures and stories. But as the year progresses, the family just gets poorer ... Meanwhile, Fing and her two sisters, wild Muulke and fearful Jess, begin to discover strange mysteries ... a bed that looks like a tombstone, an unmarked grave in the cemetery ... until at last the story of those who came before begins slowly to emerge. In the end, Fing learns that love and stories are her family's wealth ... 'Nine Open Arms' is an exceptional imagined historical mystery - the story of a very special home, the eccentric families who have lived within it, and the unexpected ties that emerge between the two.