A review by leafilippi
The Boxes by William Sleator

Although I have seen this pitched as young adult science fiction, it works equally well for younger students. My second grader picked this book out at the school library and happily plowed through it in a single evening. I liked that the unusual elements and events weren't explained away as "magic" but were instead presented just as the facts of what happened. I liked that the plot and characters included loose ends that were never fully explicated, in contrast to the tidy wrapping up that you tend to find in books aimed at the middle grades.