I enjoyed this book and have already recommended it to someone. I've seen reviews that say the ending felt rushed -- I can agree with that, but I disagree that some felt like it didn't fit the rest of the book. The story of loss, family, companionship, and grief are not easy subjects to tackle. Even though they are universal feelings, we each deal with them individually, as these characters do.

It reads almost like a fable, being recalled by the individual characters. Readers who say it "wasn't believable" have missed the point.

Parents of two cousins are killed in a train wreck, and the teenaged girls are sent to live with an eccentric and reclusive uncle on an island in British Columbia. All are at a loss as to what to do with one another and with their grief. A housekeeper/cook, a caricature of the Yiddish grandmother, is hired to take care of things the uncle cannot manage. She is also dealing with the loss of her husband and sons. She hires a butler who ends up taking care of everyone and everything.
No one deals with grief in a healthy way.The uncle has retreated to the island, one girl retreats inside herself, the other tries to build a machine to fly away from her grief. The housekeeper medicates with "cough medicine."
Bleak, gray wet, rainy, and unhappy, switching point of view with each chapter, this book is a major downer. Chirstmas is a disaster, with the reason for having more than one Jesus for the manger a welcomed bit of comic relief. The silent cousin disappears inside herself, aided by the housekeeper's "cough medicine," the uncle thwarts the runaway, the housekeeper dies, turns out the butler is actuually a priest ineffectually trying to help all of these walking wounded. Everything is tied up neatly in the last chapter and the last two pages are just weird - a glossary of Yiddish terms. This is definately not "Everything on Waffle." ( )

Reviewed by JodiG. for TeensReadToo.com

Jocelyn and Meline are cousins with nothing more in common than a shared tragedy; the death of their parents. Now, both girls have been sent to live with their reclusive Uncle Marten on his private island.

Jocelyn and Meline are both dealing with grief in their own way, while trying to adjust to their new surroundings. Uncle Marten seems scatterbrained and completely unable to properly interact with others, much less to offer support to the two traumatized girls.

To help, Uncle Marten hires Mrs. Mendelbaum to serve as the housekeeper and Mr. Humdinger as the butler. Unfortunately, Mrs. Mendelbaum is consumed with her own personal losses and Meline is sure that Humdinger's lurking behavior is evidence of untrustworthy actions.

Even the island they live on has a dark past. It was once used as the training grounds for pilots in a program that went terribly wrong. Now the island is littered with the wreckage of the planes that crashed during that program. And, Meline is sure that she and Jocelyn can build a plane of their own from the wreckage and escape from the island and their new lives.

THE CORPS OF THE BARE-BONED PLANE is a wonderfully written story about how differently each person reacts when faced with grief and change. It is told from the viewpoints of four of the main characters: Jocelyn, Meline, Uncle Marten, and Mrs. Mendelbaum. In addition to the main characters, author Polly Horvath has woven together a rich mixture of people and plots to provide an enjoyable reading experience. ( )

I didn't finish this, largely because I was reading for the purpose of compiling a booklist and this didn't turn out to fit well. Even if I were reading this just for pleasure I'm not sure I would have finished -- her characters are, as always, unbeatable. Horvath is great at getting in the minds of her children and teen characters. That said, the plot plodded along and gave the reader no incentive to continue. Although I felt I knew the characters, I wasn't drawn to them and I didn't care about them enough to trudge on. ( )

This is the story of two orphaned cousins who go to live on a remote island with a strange uncle, a woman hired mistakenly as a cook, and an unnecessary butler. The atmosphere on the island is indeed creepy, but the characters and the story are disappointing.
The story is told from various points of view, and not only was the jumping from voice to voice annoying, but the adult characters are full of irritating verbal tics. While there were some wonderfully amusing lines ("Well, there are those who think the answer lies in undiscovered knowledge and those who think it lies in cake.",) all of the characters left me cold. And it is a rare day I can't muster up sympathy for an orphan.
The only thing that kept me reading was the plot, it promised to be delightfully twisty. But it failed to deliver here as well. While the roots of many mysteries were hinted at, everything is hurriedly tied up in the last chapter, where it appears the plot got bored and wandered off. The last few pages were just ridiculous. ( )