Kierin Meehan’s Hannah’s Winter was one of the most promising débuts in some time. Her second novel, the ambitious Night Singing (by Kierin Meehan, Puffin, $16.95 pb, 224pp), attests to Meehan’s importance as a new writer for the middle-school years reader. There’s a magical quality to Night Singing and, although it is not a fantasy, a sense of the fantastic pervades the novel. Meehan has woven various plot strands and numerous characters into a delightful and, at times, deeply moving whole. Her characters, some of whom are wildly eccentric, never seem less than real, and her plot, although full of extraordinary coincidences – coincidences that, in less capable hands, would be both lazy and unconvincing – is believable and satisfying.