Review of The White Guinea-Pig

Dubosarsky has a Chekhovian deftness in dealing with tragedy - the death of a baby, a father's imprisonment - that affects the lives of her characters, but the central image of the weird white guinea-pig, like a phosphorescent apparition appearing at unexpected times, is somehow unsatisfactory. Her great empathy with children is very clear, but maybe she has been cast as a children's writer against her instincts, for there are wonderful strangenesses in her writing that are not yet fully unleashed.