The Water Castle / Megan Frazer Blakemore / 344 pages

After their father's stroke, three children move to a family estate in Crystal Springs, Maine with their physician mother and disabled father.  The middle child, Ephraim, has the most difficulty in adjusting to their family crisis and their new home.  When he learns of a mysterious spring with waters purported to be the fountain of life, he and two of the kids from town whose families are bound to the Water Castle, seek to find the water so he can help his father and they can understand their past.  This book offers a lot.  It is beautifully written with chapters that alternate between the present and the early 1900's, has amazing characters, builds tension, uses a setting with a mysterious castle, incorporates history and explores scientific experimentation.  Blakemore manages to weave the past and present together and forge a new future for the Appledore family and others in Crystal Springs.  This is a wonderful book that readers in grades 5-7 will greatly enjoy and will want to share with others.