This review also appears on my blog, Read-at-Home Mom.

Return to Gone-Away is Elizabeth Enright’s sequel to her 1958 Newbery Honor Book, Gone-Away Lake. The second book follows the adventures of Portia and her family as they work to restore an abandoned house at Gone-Away Lake so they can spend the summers there. As they uncover the treasures and skeletons hidden in the closets of their new home, Portia and Foster spend time with their cousin Julian and their elderly friends, Uncle Pindar and Aunt Minnehaha, who indulge the children’s interest in history, as well as their imaginations.

Though this sequel is nearly as well-written as the first book, I didn’t see much of anything new in this story that made me understand why a sequel was necessary. Though I could see readers being interested in the mysteries of an abandoned house, Portia and the other characters already had the experience of exploring Gone-Away in the first book, and this story just seemed like more of the same. I kept waiting for whatever the new twist was going to be, but it never quite happened.

I also had trouble buying into the idea that kids are overly interested in learning about what older people were like as children. I think readers like the kind of stories Uncle Pindar tells about his boyhood, but the structure of this book distances the readers from those adventures by telling about them in the voice of an adult. I think this would be a much better children’s book if it stuck more to the children’s point of view. It might have been interesting to either have Pin and Minnie tell their own stories in their own book where they appear as children, or to have the book alternate back and forth between the present and the past. Everything that happens in the story is interesting, but sometimes the interesting stuff is obscured by the way it is delivered. I also think Pindar and Minnehaha are kind of creepy. I think we’re supposed to see their love for the past as charming, but to me, it just looked sad. I continued to think of Miss Havisham, who is the fictional picture of emotionally instability, and certainly not someone I’d let kids hang out with unsupervised!

All in all, unless Gone-Away Lake is your favorite book of all time, there’s no real reason to also read the sequel. Nostalgic adults might find it charming, but I was pretty bored, and I think most kids I know would choose to put this book aside in favor of something with a bit more action, or at least a bit more of a kid-friendly approach to storytelling.

The sequel to Gone-Away Lake, this novel is just as fun and interesting.

What child has not wanted to discover a lost place and create a special hidden retreat known only to herself and maybe a few friends? These are the continuing adventures of Portia and her family who are reclaiming an abandoned house in an old summer colony of houses. The house contains many secrets which will be discovered, along with the natural world waiting outside the door. Great book! possibly better than the first in the series, giving an idyllic feel of what childhood summer used to be.

This book picks up several months after “Gone-Away Lake” ends, and it’s just as delightful as the first.
Reading this book made me want to buy an old forgotten house filled with who knows what, and explore it, remake it, and live in it. Once again the characters are unique and fun, There is more about the house than Gone-Away, but that was okay. Uncle Pin and Aunt Minnehaha were still in the story, still ready to tell tales of long ago, and still up for fun.
Julian had me grinning with his plan for “self discipline” and what came of it.

There were not nearly as many euphemisms in this book, and only a few slang words, so I enjoyed it more. This is not a Christian book, and there is a small scene of Portia and her friend Lucy reading an old book titled “Mme. Vavasour’s Gypsy-Witch Fortune Teller” but they quickly realize that it’s all a bunch of nonsense.

I loved this book all over again. I found that reading it with the internet close at hand was a boon, too. F'rinstance:

"The air rang with the energetic, joyful clamor of the birds. Only one, whose song came sweetly through the others, sounded meditative and solitary: three minor notes ascending...
'What's that bird, Jule? That sort of sad one?'
Julian listened. 'White-throated sparrow,' he told her."

And I found that it does sound exactly as described:
White-throated Sparrow.

There is also this, which I would like to have painted on the wall of my library:

"Sometimes a story can open a world for you: you step into it and forget the real one you live in."

That's how these books are.

I like this, but not nearly as well as the first book. I think this reread was only the third time I've read this one and it really just isn't as good as the first.

Another MAJOR nostalgia read. It’s been awhile for this one and I felt like I was seeing old friends again after a long absence. Uncle Pin and Aunt Minniehaha! Villa Caprice! Othello! [Nov. 2008]