The Rat Queen, by Pete Hautman

Annie's father is fond of telling her stories from the Old Country, fairy tales from faraway Litvania.  They are strange stories and always end up in rather unsatisfactory and unhappy ways.  No one else seems to have ever heard of Litvania, but Papa assures her that it very much exists.

When Annie turns ten, her father gives her a peculiar instruction.  Henceforth, whenever she does something she regrets, she must write it down on a slip of paper and stuff the paper into a hole in the floor.  By doing so, she will be assuaged of all guilt and regret.  She does so and is surprised to find that it works.  But there also seem to be curious side effects:  the neighborhood becomes infested with rats and Annie seems to have stopped growing.  After her father makes several mysterious trips back to Litvania, he announces that they must go back together and it is there that the Litvanian queen reveals all.

A dark and fairly sinister story with great depth and plenty of color, but whose actual story felt uneven and unengaging.  Litvania, while fictional, is a lovely amalgam of Latvian and Lithuanian culture (neither of which is commonly found in American literature).  The story is littered with the dark and macabre fairy tales of Litvania, which riff nicely on the original Grimms (i.e., non-Disneyfied) Tales.  The rats and the entire concept behind the "eater of sins" is fascinating.  This is a story whose concepts will stick with me for some time.  

It is thus a shame that the story is so lame.  For the first two hundred pages, it is terribly slow and it took me some fortitude (and most of a week) to plow ahead, but then everything speeds up at the end in seeming recklessness.  Either way, I found the reading more of a chore than a pleasure, no matter how much I enjoy the Baltic and folkloric references.