Gr. 5^-7. At 12, Rainie Marie is in charge of her five younger brothers and sisters, especially when Mama's depression gets bad. Now Mama is sending the children away again from their home in Poughkeepsie to stay with Great-Gran down the Hudson. Great-Gran is kind and loving, and Rainie manages to cope, but then Great-Gran gets ill, and a bossy aunt arranges to split up the children among various relatives and caregivers. Rainie's first-person narrative includes too many self-conscious metaphors about the search for roots, but there is a convincing realism to the family interchanges and no sentimentality about what it's like to travel around with small children--the mess and bickering and search for comfort. Even the villainous aunt is humanized when Rainie realizes that she herself is just as domineering. The homecoming story is drawn with a combination of farce and sorrow and then with rising excitement as Rainie devises a plan that just might hold the family together

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