SPOILER WARNING
Pringle's parents are killed in a carriage accident. She's brought home from her boarding school by her uncle, only to endure physical abuse from her aunt and have to watch her brother Gideon, who has Down's syndrome, get hit, too. One of her only respites is the time she spends with "Rabbit" (there's a lot of Alice in Wonderland in this thing), a young miner. Things come to a head in the house and she takes some money from her father's hiding place and runs away to Chicago with her brother. While on the journey, she befriends a young mother with three children, and then there's a train accident. She gets to Chicago only to learn that the friend of her mother's she was planning on staying with was committed to an asylum by her asshole father. She goes to the family she met on the train and becomes their nursemaid. Blah blah blah, the mother's brother is coming and it's all they can talk about. Who does it turn out to be but Pringle's "Rabbit?" Only her younger brother is terrified of him. Well, the huge twist to the book is that Rabbit was one of the miners who caused the carriage accident. Pringle flies at him, calling him a murderer, and of course, her loyal friend is suddenly not so loyal. Even though her brother committed a crime, she has zero sympathy for the girl she's taken in for all this time.
So Pringle runs off to look for her brother and hey, it's the great fire. He ends up being alive but the asshole family's house is destroyed. Yay. She never sees any of them again, so who knows if they lived or not? Apparently, we're not even supposed to care about the children.
The epilogue is minorly satisfying, because when she comes of age for her inheritance, she kicks the abusive aunt out of the house and the uncle's dead already.
Seriously though, this thing has enough drama to be a soap opera. It's a children's historical novel! Did we really need the mom's old friend to be in an asylum? Did we need the train accident? And what are the odds that this random woman she meets on the train is her weird crush's sister? Weird crush who's been, like, stalking the daughter of the people he killed and kissing her. That's so creepy. And I always get pissed that the bitch turns so quickly on Pringle to support her killer brother.
This book gives me a lot of angry feelings. I don't like nasty characters to not get a solid comeuppance. Some of these concepts are also way more adult than the target audience should be reading. Although now that I look at what else the author contributed, it's the one about the coal miner's bride, the teenage Polish girl who comes to America, and becomes the only Dear America diary writer to have sex. So I'm not really surprised.
I really don't recommend this one. The whole story is rushed. It's one flashback after another. It's one overly dramatic incident after another. It does suck you in, I'll give it that, but the ending is such a suckerpunch that it ruins any good the book created. It's also barely historical. It's just kind of a mess.
Except for Gideon. Gideon is an excellent character and I love him.
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