The Copycat

Ali comes from a family of Copycats. These are people like her father who can change themselves into a physical copy of anyone they can picture clearly in their mind. Ali, however, is a Constant like her mother; apparently no transforming for her! She and her parents have at long last in their peripatetic existence returned to Digger's roots in St John, New Brunswick, because Gigi (Ali's Great Grandmother) has asked them to come and live with her. As she approaches her hundredth birthday, she can't stay there alone any longer. Digger didn't want to move to St John – something to do with an old family feud between his family and the Other Sloans which he refuses to talk about but which Ali has come to realize has to do with the death of Digger's brother Teddy – but the opportunity to live rent-free is too good to pass up. Digger is an unsuccessful artist who is unable to manage the social contacts that holding down a job would entail; Ali's mother is a shift worker at a nursing home; money is tight enough that shared toilets, and paper-thin apartment walls, even eviction because of non-payment of rent, have been commonplace.

Having had so many new-school experiences, Ali has developed a set of "rules" (neatly set out in boxed lists in the text) which had previously smoothed her path to acceptance or at least invisiblity, but the Princess Elizabeth School seems different somehow, the people both friendlier and, at the same time, less inclined to accept her expressed agreement as being an actual opinion, thus negating #3 of ALI'S RULES FOR MAKING FRIENDS: Agree with them. Ali also denies ALI'S RULES FOR WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN YOU WANT TO MEET SOMEONE, #1: Don't join a club you have no interest in joining, by joining the debating club, although she hates speaking in public. But, since she really wants to meet Alfie, the Other Sloane just about her age, and since Alfie is already a member, perhaps she will be able to find out more about the feud? Perhaps even resolve it? Since it makes both Digger and Gigi so unhappy, that would be an outcome worth the agony of talking in front of a group of people.

The first thing the debating club does for her, however, is to reveal that she is, in fact, a Copycat! This fact leads to her breaking yet another Rule: don't let anyone know that you can transform! It does take a while for these new friends to accept her as something other than a freak, but they do prove to be real friends, and together they, and Alfie, have adventures in the fog, go biking to see seals on the beach, and, yes, eventually, stage Gigi's hundredth birthday party, Hollywood-themed. And then there’s those peculiar quotations from Uncle Percy's History of Fog in the Bay of Fundy, with peculiar comments written in by Digger and Teddy that don't make sense. The book also transforms, and, when Ali comes into her power as a Copycat, the "real" text is revealed which leads her to the solution of the mystery behind Teddy's disappearance and a resolution of the feud.

The Copycat is a story of friendship, of being true to oneself, of perseverance, of courage, and of family love and affection. One of ALI'S ANIMAL RULES is that it would be nice if the dog in the house wasn't your father, and things would certainly be easier if he could stand working a bit more so that your mother could work a bit less, but Ali obviously loves and accepts her father as he is. (More to the point, so does his wife!) The friends Ali makes are real friends, and, just because they get mad at her, they don't betray her trust and are prepared to go along with her crackpot idea that the seals on the beach and Teddy are connected just because they can see it is really important to her. Ali is a good strong character and in learning to be a copycat also learns how truly to be herself.