Name: Nine Open Arms
ISBN: 9781592701469

Benny Lindelauf

When the Boon family moves into an old, ramshackle house at the very edge of a small town in the Netherlands, Oma Mei, the grandmother of seven motherless children, relates the house's remarkable origin in the 1860s.

Nine Open Arms

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

See full review at the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.
 "#DutchKidLit – Historical Fiction and the 2014, 2015 Batchelder Awards".

Nine members of a motherless family move into the abandoned house at the end of a dirt road called Sjlammmbams Sahara, maybe named after the wet coal dust called sjlamm in Limburgish, the cheaper alternative to coal, but no one actually knew. As if at the end of the world and not just the end of that long winding road, the house stood defiantly with its back to them and the rest of the town.

Fing is the oldest daughter of seven siblings, with four older brothers who were mostly interchangeable, and her two younger sisters Muulke and Jess. They are looked after by their father, a kind but rudderless man who moves from job to job, and their maternal grandmother, Oma Mei, who is stern, no nonsense, but ultimately long-suffering with one wild eye that spins every time she gets upset. Fing and her sisters have learned to watch Oma Mei’s eye closely as a barometer for storms in their lives. Like now.

The father’s motto is “First believe, then see,” a refrain he uses for every change in the wind that he follows. He moves his children from house to apartment, from street to street, up and down through their town. And now they have wheeled their belongings on a hot, windy day to the end of their world with the German border just up and through the fields beyond. Up and past the graveyard, which remains in view from their new home.

Muulke, their middle sister, has a dramatic streak, looking for “traces of tragical tragedies” wherever they move. She insists that gruesome murders and horrible events have happened in each place. And when the sisters’ three pairs of outstretched arms match the length of their largest room, Muulke believes this coincidence based on their nine family members, proves her hunch about tragic stories of long gone inhabitants is true.

Little do Fing, Muulke and Jess know that there was indeed a strange story about their newly christened house Nine Open Arms, an old story from 1863 when a group of nomadic travelers from Germany set up camp in the woods and incur the wrath of the townspeople. A disgruntled furniture maker sends his son, Charley Bottletop, to teach the travelers a lesson and make them go away. That afternoon long ago, Charley has a fateful meeting with a young traveler called Nienevee from Outside the Walls. Their meeting sets in motion events that Fing, Muulke, and Jess begin to discover when Muulke finds a secret third room in Nine Open Arms’ basement, and the tragical tragedy involving Nine Open Arms, Nienevee from Outside the Walls, and Charley Bottletop unfolds.