A Tangle of Knots
Lisa Graff's delightful, complex novel sends young readers searching for both a perfect cake recipe and a Talent with a capital "T."
A Tangle of Knots by Lisa Graff
Philomel Books,
240 pp.
Mason Burgess has lost his suitcase. No an ordinary valise, his is one of only three dozen St. Anthony's suitcases ever crafted. To make matters worse, the "one, slim irreplaceable slip of paper in it, was gone" also.
What's written on the slip of paper? Who's the mysterious traveling salesman? The plot is thickening, and bright young readers will enjoy puzzling over A Tangle of Knots, Lisa Graff's newest middle-grade novel.
Told from multiple, various, completely different, and often seemingly unrelated points of view, the story begins with that missing suitcase and jumps 53 years in one page turn. After a quick detour for a piece of Miss Mallory's Peach Cake (not only is the book filled with delicious recipes, the author is an amateur baker and the recipes look yummy), readers meet 11-year-old orphan and cake-baker, Cadence. She creates cakes for all occasions, especially when someone is happily adopted into a new family. But this is not a story about children in orphanages or even about magical suitcases. What everyone in "A Tangle of Knots" has or desperately seeks is a Talent.
Yes, that's Talent with a capital "T."
