A Fine and Private Place

“There are people who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.…”

 

A Fine and Private Place is about people who give. Mr. Rebeck, for example, who lives in the cemetery in an abandoned mausoleum and makes it his job to welcome the new arrivals. Mrs. Klapper, whose husband Morris got up from the dinner table and went right over on his back—dead! Laura who sang the night away and stayed to watch the dawn. And of course the raven—an ill-tempered but basically kindly bird known simply as “the raven”—who knows all about give and take but prefers to give after all.

 

Uproariously funny and deeply touching by turns A Fine and Private Place is a book that would have delighted E. B. White, an adult novel—yet built on the edge of fantasy and filled with the wonder and serious playfulness that children know and, sadly, lose.