I picked up a copy from a Little Free Library, I read and enjoyed a few of her books as a kid but I had not heard of this one. It was not as successful as others. I'll leave aside the highly dated dog-eat-dog world of raising and teaching children in 1936 (let the bully beat him up, it will be good for him) and mostly complain that I never really connected with the two main characters, Amy and Jason. I expected Amy to be the thoughtful dreamer kid with the wild imagination and she just didn't turn out that way. Jason was just shown to be really strange, not much reason given, then it all just ended. I may go back to The Egypt Game instead.

Amy's family relocates to Taylor Springs after her father's injury at work leaves him unable to work. Her mother grew up in Taylor Springs and they move in with her aunt, so Amy feels at home there, even though she has never been there before. Taylor Springs has a secret. Something happened at the old cabin at Stone Hollow. Nobody will talk about it, except to say that the old cabin is haunted and bad things happened there.

When Amy meets another new student at school, Jason, they begin talking about the old cabin. Jason has been going there, and talks Amy into venturing there with him. He doesn't believe the old cabin is haunted, but that the old stone in the hollow somehow folds time so people can see and hear things from the past.

He cautions Amy that the stone, and looking into the past, might be dangerous. But, Amy is desperate to find out the truth behind what happened at Stone Hollow.

This book is eerily creepy and gives out clues to the mystery very slowly and deliberately. Not all the questions are answered when the story finishes. But that just makes the mystery more realistic. Not every supernatural or mysterious occurrence is ever completely explained or solved. The fact that it wasn't all perfectly wrapped up at the end just added to the mysterious feel of the story. In the end, all of us have mysteries or situations in life that will never reveal the entire truth. As I finished the book I was thinking about those instances in my own life where I will never have the answer, rather than dwelling on the author's purposeful loose ends from the plot.

A fun, eerie read! The book is short -- only 18 chapters. So it's a perfect middle grade book that's also a wonderful rainy afternoon read for adults.

Solid 7 of 10 rating on this one!

Zilpha Keatley Snyder wrote 43 books for middle-grade children, including 3 Newbury Honor Books: The Egypt Game, The Headless Cupid and The Witches of Worm.
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When Amy Abigail Polonski returns with her parents to her mother’s hometown in southern California, after her father is crippled in an accident, she does her best to fit in at her new school. But the arrival of young Jason Fitzmaurice in Taylor Springs, in the fall of 1938, disrupts and transforms Amy’s life, as she finds herself reluctantly befriending the sensitive new boy. Different from the other children in town, Jason confuses Amy, for although she must sometimes protect him from the school bully, he is not afraid to venture into Stone Hollow, a nearby mountain valley that the townsfolk believe is haunted.

Forbidding him to mention their friendship at school, Amy spends her Sunday afternoons with Jason, and as they explore Stone Hollow, they slowly unravel the tragic history of the sinister place. Once a site of worship for Native Americans, the valley was settled by an Italian-American family who all came to tragic ends through disease, disappearance and madness, and next inhabited by a pair of bootleggers who died in suspicious circumstances. The children discover a grotto at the far end of the valley which contains a mysterious stone, one that Jason claims allows him to see people who are not there.

The process whereby Amy and Jason discover the nature of this stone - what it truly does, and how it has effected the many generations to call Stone Hollow home - is mirrored by the growing bond of friendship between them. Amy's own personal experience with the stone, shortly before she and her family must leave town once again, teaches her an additional (and very important) lesson: that truth is frequently tied to perspective, and that different people can know very different truths about the same people and events. The Truth About Stone Hollow is another of those haunting Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories which seems perfectly suited to its time period (the later years of the Great Depression, in this case), and yet, oddly timeless as well. In this respect, it reminded me of another Snyder title set in Depression-era California, The Velvet Room, and that is no small praise! Although not one of the author's very best - which title must go to books like The Changeling and Below the Root - it is still amongst her strongest, and deserves to be better known than it appears, from the paucity of online reviews, to be. ( )