MABLE RILEY

In 1901, Mable, 14, and her older sister, Viola, board with a dairy-farm family in Ontario. Viola is the new schoolteacher in Sellerton, and Mable will assist her. Their widowed mother counts on Viola’s wages to help support the children left at home. Mable confides all of this, laced with her own irrepressible curiosity and high spirits, to her diary. A mysterious neighbor, Mrs. Rattle, is young, wears the new, scandalous bloomer costume, and owns a typewriter. Mable is dazzled, and more so when she learns that Mrs. Rattle’s reading circle disguises a group of suffragists. Mrs. Rattle leads a climactic strike at the local cheese factory, which the farmers depend on as a market for their milk. As she wrestles with new ideas and her sister’s prissy ways, Mable vents her feelings in a serial that she sends to a friend back home, full of heroes and villains, romance and royalty, allowing alert readers to see ever more deeply into her emotions. An interesting ploy, and if the inner workings are a bit too obvious, still a good read. (Historical fiction. 10-14)