THE ROAD TO HOME

Remembrance “Mem” Nye is delighted to finally leave her father’s New York State farm for Connecticut and family. At 13, her life has been hard, caring for baby Lily and keeping after small brother Joshua since their mother died. But Pa is full of dreams, and when they get to Rome, New York, he’s seduced by the idea of working on the new Erie Canal. Mem is left in their tavern lodgings with the two younger children and Maude, the warm but distracted innkeeper. When Pa’s work keeps him away six days a week, and he spends the seventh drinking, Mem feels she must take the youngsters and get to Connecticut. How Mem attempts to walk to her grandmother’s forms the core of this historical novel, and the children’s adventures in the town and on the road are full of the reality of life and travel in 1817. Mem seems sometimes older, sometimes younger than 13 (for example, would even a motherless farm girl not know what her menses were when they came?), and Pa is a caricature. The resolution is neat but satisfying, and not quite what anyone expected. The difficulties of caring for a small child like Lily are vividly sketched, as are the travails of daily life in the early 19th century. Hold My Hand & Run , by Margaret McAllister (p.717) tells a similar tale set in 17th-century England. (Fiction. 9-14)