Three Times Lucky

Moses was rescued as a newborn during a hurricane in North Carolina by Colonel LoBeau and has lived with him and Miss Lana ever since. Mo is now 12-years-old and continues to look for her birthmother by sending letters in a bottle to be launched by anyone heading upstream. During her quest, she also sharpens her detective skills with her best friend, Dale Earnhart Johnson III, by finding missing cats and bicycles. When Detective Joe Starr comes to Tupelo Landing seeking information about a Winston-Salem murder, Mo’s intuition helps to solve that and several other mysteries, many of them in her own life. Narrator Michal Friedman does for this story what the narrators of Moon over Manifest did for the Great Plains. The sounds of the racetrack where Dale’s older brother races and the smells in Miss Lana’s café come alive via Friedman’s storytelling. Sheila Turnage’s words and phrases in the novel (Delacorte, 2012) give the narrator a lot to work with, and she does justice to every one of them. From the Colonel’s gruff manner to Dale’s daddy’s drunken slur and Miss Lana’s calming tone, each character is consummately voiced. Listeners will hope that there will be more books about Mo. Of special note: every chapter begins a new track, making it easy for interrupted listeners to find their place.–Ann Brownson, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston