This is a fun middle-grade novel in which two kids who are in foster care, after having been bounced around in the care system for most of their lives, discover a strange mailbox in a junkyard. Strange things start happening, through the gifts the kids receive through the mailbox. If they use those gifts well, perhaps they could improve their lives permanently, but there are also terrible risks involved, and in the meantime they are still just in foster care, with no real place to call home. ( )

Monnie and Bim are foster children who discover a magical mailbox that, once they’ve written their names on it, delivers strange gifts to them; these gifts, in turn, lead them to an otherworldly dimension where they must learn to accept themselves and their own unusual “gifts”.... I enjoy children’s fantasies for the most part, and remember some of Andre Norton’s work fondly, but this one, published in 1979, was just so-so. A quick read, but one that is liable to leave your memory just as quickly. ( )

Cute children's book. It is a Norton, so the kids explore who and what they are and have to make some hard choices, and the magic itself is interesting (where _did_ it come from? And is the old woman's knitting as related to Atropos as I think it is?). But overall nice but not wonderful. Not nearly as good as her Dragon Magic or Steel Magic. ( )