The Busybody Buddha

Lisa Arsenault is an elementary-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

This is the second adventure of the Lawrence children: 10-year-old
Abigail, 8-year-old Jacob, and 5-year-old Ernest. The action takes place
in Ontario’s Muskoka region, with the stone Buddha of the title again
influencing the course of events. The children discover an unhappy ghost
girl living on a nearby deserted island, and it becomes their
self-appointed task (with some prodding from the Buddha) to alleviate
her unhappiness.

Magic and the ordinary joys of a vacation in Muskoka are nicely
balanced in this adventure tale. Young readers get to experience the
area (“in the crags and crevices, tree roots clenched the stone like
bird claws while just above, their trunks and branches seemed on the
verge of flight above the water”), and can delight in the children
doing all the usual vacation things. At the same time, the magical plot
is seamlessly interwoven with the main narrative.

All the characters are quite well defined (at one point Ernest becomes
identified with the Buddha), and they interact with each other in a
believable fashion (dialogue is appropriate to age and personality). The
style is reminiscent of E. Nesbit (lacking her dense prose, but a pretty
good attempt at re-creating her tone), whose name and works the author
quotes several times. Rutledge’s irritating habit of referring to the
children archly as “our children,” a late-Victorian conceit (I think
she believes it’s in Nesbit’s tradition), implies a misplaced
intimacy with the reader. Recommended.