IN SEARCH OF MOCKINGBIRD

Believing that the tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird she carries around is her only connection to her dead mother, bookish Erin is angry when her newly engaged father gives her the woman’s teenaged diary as a 16th-birthday present. Reading that her mom also wanted to be a writer and even wrote to Mockingbird author Harper Lee, Erin acts on her long-held wish to meet her literary idol. Set over the course of a few days in 1986, and featuring a strong sense of the American landscape, Erin travels the thousand-plus miles from St. Paul, Minn. to Monroeville, Ala. on a bus. Along the way, she is shepherded by two quirky guardians: Sedushia, a middle-aged exotic dancer, and Epps, a big, protective computer geek. With a first-person narrative that is eloquent and credible, and prose that is restrained and economical, Ellsworth makes Erin’s unlikely coming-of-age trip convincing. Designed to look like an old journal, the story’s searching-for-mother theme should make it especially appealing to older fans of Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie (2000) and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice Books. An engaging road trip. (Fiction. 10-14)