Book review: The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett

The forty-fifth book I read in 2106 was Blue Balliett's sequel to Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3.  Having moved back from New York with his mother, Tommy Segovia had hoped that everything would go back to the way it had been before they moved away; however, the house they lived in before is occupied by a new family so they have to move into an apartment.  Worse, he finds he now has to share his best friend, Calder Pillay, with a girl, Petra Andalee, who with Calder recovered a stolen painting in his absence.

Balliett resists the urge to merely add a third character to the pairing from her earlier book, like Brains Bellingham and Mari Yoshimura to the McGurk Agency.  Tommy's resentment of Petra's relationship with Calder is true to life.  In addition, he is not as good a student as the other two and doesn't find the same enjoyment in Ms. Hussey's unorthodox sixth-grade class on which they thrive.  He has bigger problems in his family past than Petra's too-many-siblings or Calder's only-child syndrome, and it's not entirely surprising that he lies about a carved stone fish he found in a place he wasn't supposed to be.

Where in the last installment, the artist around whose work the plot twists is Vermeer, in this book, it is Frank Lloyd Wright.  The Robie House, owned by the University of Chicago, is set to be sectioned and sent to four different museums around the world in parts.  Ms. Hussey feels that to tear apart a work of art like that equates to murder and leads her class in trying to find a way to change the university's plans. Tommy's new apartment is right across the street from the house, and the house itself seems to choose him -- and the two other children who together make up the Wright 3 -- to save the structure.