Charlotte's father operates a tugboat, so he's still at home, though her older brother is off fighting.
Charlotte gets the idea for a scrap metal drive, but when the scrap all disappears, she's got a lot of leads to follow and finds some unlikely allies along the way.
The story is pretty well-written, although Charlotte's PTSD from an incident in the river when she was young is hard to read. It's frustrating when you're reading all their suffering and it would be better if she'd just friggin' TELL someone, but she doesn't. It comes to a head when she's forced...literally forced...to help her father on the tugboat.
There's a lot going on in this one and kind of a lot of characters, but it flows pretty well. The author also did AGHM #8, which I'm reading right now.
It's the suffrage book. Yaaaaaay.
This one takes place in 1914 New York City when an Irish family of a widowed mother, the heroine and her two younger sisters take in an English boarder who turns out to be a pretty major figure in the suffrage movement.
Not that she tells anyone that. The mother ends up tossed in jail, but it's not obvious to the heroine, although it is painfully obvious and frustrating to the reader. I hate books where adults deliberately hide things from kids and this is one of those.
It's not a horrible suffrage book, but the entire mystery wouldn't exist if adults would just treat children like real people.
We've got the same problem in this one. Bessie's mother has TB, which is apparently some big horrible deal back in 1928, so her father takes her and her younger brother and runs away to Harlem.
Without telling the kids a damn thing.
I mean, come the fuck on. Tell them the mother's sick but don't tell them what it is if TB is such a freak out-worthy thing.
So of course Bessie thinks her dad's abandoned her mom and he's all stupidly secretive about what he's doing in Harlem for work and Bessie goes running all over trying to solve the mystery.
The cover highlights one of the worst bits. No one is going to think a 12-year-old kid is an adult. Also, no 12-year-old kid is going to immediately be able to walk in heels like Bessie apparently can.
It's not a horrible book. The setting and time period are excellent. I wish AG would do a Harlem Renaissance girl and this book just fueled that want even more. But another hiding things from kids turns into a mystery book and even worse this time is annoying and takes away from what's good about the story.
Ah, this one. I love this one. Kathleen Ernst steps up to the plate here. She wrote 3 books in this series, plus several historical character mysteries and the Caroline series.
Suzette is an awesome character. She's half-Ojibwe and half-French, so she's caught in between two worlds, but as she says in the end, she wouldn't have been able to solve the mystery without skills from each part of her.
This is set in 1732, so it's one of the earliest of the series.
Excellent characters here, excellent mystery. Suzette is actually almost treated like an adult and she's got a lot of freedom to do as she pleases, so she can get things done.
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