Reading Virginia Hamilton is like being shot out of a cannon into the Milky Way. Sometimes just a phrase sends you off, an image or a scene, but invariably at the end of a book you marvel: look how high I've been just on words! Indeed such is the extraordinary quality of Miss Hamilton's imagination that her characters seem to have to go faster than other fictional characters just to keep up with her. They speed past, splintering time: M. C. Higgins (in the award-winning book of that name) swimming as if he were made of quicksilver; Arilla Sundown (in the book of the same title) guiding her sled at breakneck pace to the very edge of a precipice. And now [in Justice and Her Brothers] we have Justice on her bicycle, hurtling down Quinella Hill, faster and faster to the flat place at the bottom….

Justice is...