the ballad of lucy whipple karen cushman

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. 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. Where? To the circus, of course.įortunately 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. 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.

With a story that is less a period piece than a timeless and richly comic coming-of-age story, Cushman remains on a roll. Arvella eventually moves on, but Lucy has not only lost her desire to leave California, but found a vocation as well: town librarian. Other characters are drawn with a broader brush, a shambling platoon of unwashed miners with hearts (and in one case, teeth) of gold. Ever willing to lose herself in a book when she should be doing errands, Lucy is an irresistible teenager her lively narration and stubborn, slightly naive self-confidence (as well as a taste for colorful invective: ``Gol durn, rip-snortin' rumhole and cussed, dad-blamed, dag diggety, thundering pisspot,'' she storms) recall the narrator of Catherine, Called Birdy (1994), without seeming as anachronistic. It's a far cry from Massachusetts as her mother determinedly settles in, California rebelliously changes her name to Lucy and starts saving every penny for the trip back east.

Arvella Whipple and her three children, Sierra, Butte, and 11-year-old California Morning, make a fresh start in Lucky Diggins, a town of mud, tents, and rough-hewn residents. The recent Newbery medalist plunks down two more strong-minded women, this time in an 1849 mining camp-a milieu far removed from the Middle Ages of her first novels, but not all that different when it comes to living standards.

The ballad of lucy whipple karen cushman