Mom is working long crazy hours while dad is gone without communicating with his wife and children. Right away the reader knows that the Stanwright household is going through many emotional things at one time. Stanly, his best friend Jaxon with an x, and Stanly's sister, Miren would water it and suddenly it was growing taller, like a tree. It started out with a skeleton hand growing in the backyard. I got this for the book design and the title. Instead, he'd dreamed about shadow zpmbies performing a ballet, and how he and Miren and even Princy got up onstage and danced with them. 'Stanly woke up Sunday morning to the sound of laughter and the smell od sizzling bacon.To his surprise, he hadn't had any more nightmares about hollow eye sockets or bony fingers. 'By now you should know, little Stanley, that the ones you hold dear never leave you.' Now it was him and Mom and Miren on one side and inch by inch they were sinking into the ground.' Like how a seesaw needs someone on both sides to keep it upright. 'When Dad was here everything felt balanced.

With him gone, they were just a bunch of spare parts.' 'Dad was like the hard drive to the Stanwright family computer. It's wonderful and it was a fantastic debut for Ventrella. I would definitely recommend this book to others. The writing was quite simple but it was enjoyable and it kept my attention throughout the entire book.

The other characters were also all very three-dimensional, they felt so real and the relationships in the book had a lot of depth but they were still quite simple at the core so kids will have no problem with the book. This is one of those books where you will cry from sadness but also cry from happiness too. Everything isn't what it seems in the story and I just thought it played out very nicely. I won't say much about the plot because I don't want to ruin anything but the story was good and I loved the magical element. It sort of reminded me of A Monster Calls - only in the sense that it's about a young boy who is in a horrible situation that he was too young to understand and a magical creature comes to his house but the two are two completely different stories. Ventrella really did a fantastic job with Stanley, he really sounded like a naïve 12 year old boy who was losing his innocence because of situations he couldn't understand at the beginning. The best thing about the book is the fact that it's told from a 12 year old's point of view. It may be a children's book but it's definitely a book that can be enjoyed by adults and teens too, in my opinion. Holy crap this book was so beautiful and heartbreaking.

Skeleton tree by kim ventrella