When I Was Seven by Mary Ellen Bramwell carries a poignant power. The reader finds himself caring deeply about seven-year-old narrator Lucas who embodies a rare combination of innocence and prescience. His compassion for his dying grandmother Josephine is marked by a seemingly bottomless desire to understand. As he is presented with the seemingly quixotic challenge of discovering his grandmother’s long lost past, Lucas must confront deep stresses on his parents’ marriage, the steady deterioration of Josephine, and a markedly compromised second grandmother whom he enlists in this quest. That second grandmother, Mamie, serves as a wonderful counterpoint to the more earnest grieving family members. In her interactions with Lucas, Mamie is thorny, witty, and frank. She shares a tendency with Josephine to treat Lucas with a candor that his parents refuse to in their efforts to shield him from further pain. The reader watches Lucas grow throughout the novel as he gains wisdom not only beyond his years, but often beyond the adults in his life (“I kept listening like Grandma told me to, but I was listening to silence. I guess that’s important too”). The presence of his friend Justin grounds Lucas in the normal schemes of little boys, like their building of a doghouse as a way to convince Justin’s parents to get a puppy. In other words, despite Lucas’s extraordinary qualities, Bramwell has created such a vivid, plausible world that the reader embraces his interactions as sharply realistic and therefore more affecting. The slow unfolding of grandma Josephine’s past – through her halting recollections, Lucas’s persistent questioning, and Mamie’s investigations – keeps the reader engrossed as do the domestic dramas bubbling to surface and the mysterious evocations of distant beach memories. And then there are the nifty plot twists, which shall not be revealed here.When I Was Seven reverberates with echoes of the past and shimmers with possibilities for the future. Bramwell has created the compelling tale of the loss of a grandmother that is wonderfully life-affirming.