Fing has moved with her family into a house called Nine Open Arms. Located at the end of a lonely road outside a village near the Dutch border with Germany, it’s the most recent in a series of places they’ve lived since her mother’s death. Fing and her sisters, spitfire Muhlke and timid Jess, spend time together while their four older brothers help their dreamer of a father with his latest, well-intentioned moneymaking plan. The girls trek to the village to attend school, and ponder their home’s oddities, including an extraordinary carved bed with a headboard that looks like a tombstone in one of the cellars, a front door knee-height off the ground, and prodigious leaking with the first heavy rain. Later they discover Oompah, a mute, homeless tailor, has set up house in the hedgerow. It turns out the children’s maternal grandmother Oma Mei, who oversees the family’s life with stern affection, knows the history of Nine Open Arms but is reluctant to reveal it. When she finally tells the story of Charley Bottletop and Nienevee, the Traveler girl who captured his heart, a tale of pain and love and prejudice and pride, it seems like it was fated that Fing’s family come to Nine Open Arms, to release the house from the past, and to plant themselves firmly in ground where they can grow. In a story told with humor and great affection, Fing discovers that Nine Open Arms, like her family, is marked by displacement and determination, loss and, above all, love and hope. (Ages 10–13)

At the edge of a small village in the Netherlands in 1937, three sisters and their eccentric family move to a house with a mysterious past. Storytelling is what their Oma does best. As her family stories unfold, familiar people and a ghost story intersect, and the history of the house becomes clear. This lovely, layered novel, with snippets of dialect and rich language, is the first in a duo of books about a poor family with dreams of a better life, and is followed by Fing's War.

2015 Batchelder Honor Award.

The award-winning author lives in the Netherlands.

Netherlands. Originally published in Dutch as Negen Open Armen by Emmanuel Querido Publishers in 2004. English translation by John Nieuwenhuizen published in the United States by Enchanted Lion Books in 2014.

The Boon family story and their indefatigable gallows humor are Benny Lindelauf's literary memorial to those persecuted by history.

A ghost story, a fantasy, a historical novel, and literary fiction all wrapped into one, this highly awarded novel for young readers begins with the Boon family's move to an isolated, dilapidated house. Is it the site of a haunting tragedy, as one of the daughters believes, or an end to all their worries, as their father hopes? The novel's gripping language, enriched by Yiddish, German, and Dutch dialect, plunges the reader into the world of a large, colorful, motherless family.