Engrossing, entertaining, and heartfelt.
A girl fends for herself in Revolutionary War–era Boston.
Boston, 1776: 13-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper, a kitchen maid for a British loyalist judge, hunkers down during the chaos of George Washington’s violent siege on Boston. When the British are driven out and Elspeth’s sailmaker father—her only surviving family member after her mother and siblings died from smallpox—goes missing, Elsbeth is left to navigate an uncertain future on her own. She finds employment with former Patriot spy Mister Pike and his family, who have moved into the judge’s vacated home. Elsbeth is once more a maid, this time to the six Pike children and Hannah Sparhawk, the family’s sharp-witted, highborn charge. With the help of best friend Shubel Kent, Elsbeth searches for Pappa even as the city is ravaged by an explosion in smallpox numbers and a new government forms amid talk of independence. As she cares for the Pike family during their recovery from smallpox inoculation, Elsbeth must protect her own interests against outside forces, including the Pikes’ bitter housekeeper and a disreputable acquaintance of her father’s, all the while forming a friendship with Hannah and staying true to herself. Told through Elsbeth’s clever, feminist, often-humorous perspective, this original and timely story immerses readers in her observations on an epidemic and vaccination, early American politics and society, and the meaning of family. The main characters are white; the book contains references to enslaved people.
Engrossing, entertaining, and heartfelt. (map, bibliography, sources and references) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781416968269
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Some readers may feel that the resolution comes a mite too easily, but most will enjoy the journey and be pleased when...
Two sisters make an unauthorized expedition to their former hometown and in the process bring together the two parts of their divided family.
Dooley packs plenty of emotion into this eventful road trip, which takes place over the course of less than 24 hours. Twelve-year-old Ophelia, nicknamed Fella, and her 16-year-old sister, Zoey Grace, aka Zany, are the daughters of a lesbian couple, Shannon and Lacy, who could not legally marry. The two white girls squabble and share memories as they travel from West Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina, where Zany is determined to scatter Mama Lacy’s ashes in accordance with her wishes. The year is 2004, before the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and the girls have been separated by hostile, antediluvian custodial laws. Fella’s present-tense narration paints pictures not just of the difficulties they face on the trip (a snowstorm, car trouble, and an unlikely thief among them), but also of their lives before Mama Lacy’s illness and of the ways that things have changed since then. Breathless and engaging, Fella’s distinctive voice is convincingly childlike. The conversations she has with her sister, as well as her insights about their relationship, likewise ring true. While the girls face serious issues, amusing details and the caring adults in their lives keep the tone relatively light.
Some readers may feel that the resolution comes a mite too easily, but most will enjoy the journey and be pleased when Fella’s family figures out how to come together in a new way . (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-16504-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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