This sad and eerie first novel has a dream-like quality that will quietly sweep readers to another place and era. Set in the Balkan countryside in the year 1913, the tale begins on the night of a terrible storm, when 11-year-old Tanya's parents are washed away by a flooded river. Eyeing her parents' lucrative farm, villagers are quick to step in, and Pavel and his wife, Anna, even offer to adopt Tanya. Tanya, refusing to believe that her mother and father are really dead, prefers to stay on the farm with her cow, Milenka. Anticipating her parents' homecoming, Tanya makes a batch of muffins every day. Soon she becomes known as "the muffin child," a girl "not like other children, but solitary, gifted, and dangerous." Neither the coziness of her mother's kitchen nor the memory of her father's sage advice can protect Tanya from outside forces. Pavel tries to claim her land, women invade her kitchen and Gypsies set up camp in her meadow. Menick shows uncanny insight and unusual literary skill. Besides evoking Tanya's fear, denial, suspicions and loneliness, he reveals the complexity of each of his minor characters. Hearts will go out to Tanya as she desperately clings to hope and struggles to protect what is rightfully hers. Ages 10-14.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 5-9-It is 1913 and 11-year-old Tanya, who lives in an unspecified country in the Balkans, finds herself an orphan after her parents drown. She spurns the help of the other villagers, and with only her cow as company, attempts to survive alone. The village women resent her independence and skill at baking and shun her, although the men continue to buy her muffins, earning her the name of Muffin Child. When Gypsies camp in her family's fields and begin to torment her, Tanya finds herself even more isolated and unsure of whom to trust. The book's most exciting scene involves a missing boy who is developmentally disabled. It is eventually revealed that he has been kidnapped by Anton, an itinerant knife sharpener who blames the boy's disappearance on the Gypsies, knowing that the villagers will then rid the town of their presence. That, in fact, happens, but not before Tanya is blamed and she tries to deflect attention from herself by pointing a finger at the Gypsies. The convoluted nature of this incident is indicative of many aspects of The Muffin Child. Many of the characters' motivations, including the protagonist's, are often murky. Also, the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the Gypsies is a puzzling authorial choice. Finally, readers are distanced from the action by the book's introductory and concluding segments: a mother tells her daughter Tanya about her great-grandmother Tanya, who in the end is rescued from the villagers and from a fever by the Gypsies. Within a year of the above-described events, she has immigrated to New York. The story is strangely anticlimactic, and only persistent readers who are engaged by the book's mysterious, haunting quality will see it through to its finish.
Ellen Fader, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 5^-7. This bittersweet tale of a Balkan village's kindness and cruelty to an orphan will appeal most to readers who enjoy psychological explorations of character. Tanya, 11, initially copes with her parents' loss in a flood by expecting them back any moment; meanwhile, she keeps busy making muffins, which become so popular she starts selling them. Many neighbors help around the farm, but their motives become suspect, as several help themselves to the harvest and a group of women attempt to trick her into revealing her muffin recipe. After refusing to move in with another family, she gains a reputation for being "solitary, gifted, and dangerous," so when a child is missing, the villagers come after Tanya and torch the farm. Fearfully trying to head them off, she accuses a nearby Gypsy encampment, thus instigating a massacre, then discovers that she's been a murderous madman's pawn. In a strained final twist, Tanya finds a place with the surviving Gypsies, who take her to America. Readers who brave the leisurely plot and populous cast may gain some insight into how easily an insular outlook can explode into violence, or they will at least grow to respect Tanya's ability to make her own way. John Peters

In a first novel set ``in a country in the Balkans,'' an 11-year-old girl suffers the loss of her parents, then lives through a series of brutal events. After her parents are swept away by a flooded bridge, Tanya tells herself that they will come back, and begins to bake muffins from her mother's recipe. Her efforts bring appreciative neighbors, then paying customers, then outlandishly jealous women from the village, who, Menick implies, think that their husbands are visiting Tanya too often. She trusts no one; when friendly Pavel suggests that the gypsies have ruined her orchard, digging for buried money, Tanya knows that he is the one who has made the holes, damaging tree roots. She is under siege, real and emotional, for as she accepts that her parents are dead, she must face those who covet her farm and home. A knife-sharpener, Anton, is her only friend, but he ``borrows'' the village idiot, hoping that angry villagers will think the gypsies are behind the boy's disappearance, and murder them. With stiff dialogue and grotesque events - the bloody decapitation of a chicken, a barn-burning, the sharpener's attempted murder of Tanya, and his own gory death, a description of gangrene and amputation - driving the story more than character or plotting, this novel never meshes. It opens as a compelling and unusual story of a strongly delineated child survivor, then loses force as people's actions become staged and unbelievable. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.