FernFolio

What’s a guy to do when the girl he likes gives him a box of note paper and stamped envelopes before she moves away to a nearby town? If you’re Owen Skye, you start writing her letters telling her about life, about your two brothers, Andy and Leonard, about your dog, Sylvester, who has a thing about carrying around stones, and about your new baby cousin, Fillus Phyllis, who’ll only calm down and go to sleep if your mother drives you over so that you can pick her up and talk to her a while.  But, if you’re Owen Skye, you’re also going to be too embarrassed about your spelling and too shy about telling Sylvia how you feel about her to actually send those letters.
Through his letters, which he writes and stores in a box in the basement of the old farmhouse in which his family lives, Owen shares his growing concern when his father quits his job as an insurance salesman to write a novel, throwing the family’s finances into turmoil.  He tells Sylvia all about the book, how it’s about an invisible insurance salesman turned super hero who falls in love with a waitress named Rebecca, and how his parents starts to argue when the book starts to take a long, long time to get written, and his mother has to go out and find a job.  And he expresses his feelings of uncertainty and frustration when, after inviting him to join her Scottish dancing group, Sylvia then decides that she prefers to dance with Danny Bainman.
Deer Dear Sylvia is a lovely story about a family struggling through hard times, about dreams and disappointment, and about a boy’s first love.  A terrific sequel to The Secret Life of Owen Skye, and After Sylvia.
Dear Sylvia won the 2009 Silver Birch Express prize.
FernFolio Editor