WILDWING

Addy is a 15-year-old dreamer suffering the dual humiliations of poverty and fatherlessness in her small-minded English village. When her curiosity leads her to an opportunity to travel back in time to the Middle Ages, Addy hesitates only a moment before leaving 1913 behind. Relying on her agile wits to survive, she deftly appropriates the identity of Lady Matilda, betrothed from afar to Sir Hugh, the absentee landowner to whom she is to be married in just a few weeks. In a tense first-person narration intercut with letters from Eustace, Sir Hugh's shrewd and suspicious steward, Addy masquerades as the lady of the castle. Along the way, she finds her voice as a woman and falls dangerously in love with Will, Sir Hugh’s falconer. The central plot elements—time travel, mistaken identity, forbidden romance—are overly familiar devices, but Addy is an engagingly inventive heroine. Whitman's attention to historical detail and vivid descriptions bring the past alive to create an absorbing fictional world that will hook readers from the first page. (author’s note, sources) (Historical fiction. 12 & up)