Innocenza is an orphan girl living in Boston's North End in 1908 with her controlling grandmother, her aunt and uncle, and various cousins. Her best friend is her cousin Teresa, whose older sister Carmela tells the girls about a new settlement house for immigrant children where they learn dancing, singing and some household tasks, as well as being able to borrow books from the library. Part of the settlement house is a pottery where Carmela works as a painter.
The troubles at the settlement house start shortly after the weekly library clubs begin meeting and while investigating, Innie brings negative attention to herself. Despite the blame, she is determined to solve the mystery with help from her new Russian Jewish friend Matela and a usually reluctant Teresa.
The mystery is a decent one in which you discover the means well before the perpetrator. Innie's personal struggles with thinking she's been promised to the Catholic nuns against her wishes are another part of the story, as well as Carmela's struggle to earn citizenship. The Italian male sexism in the story is not welcome, but sadly historically accurate. Pretty sad when the women in the household are the only actual citizens yet you don't respect their ability to read and write when your own sucks! Ugh, men.
But yeah, great book, great characters. Innie and Matela are both awesome.
And so we follow two good ones with this dud. Southern family at the end of the Civil War. Dad's still off fighting. Just received word older brother died. The mystery is the deserter in the woods and the thief around the farm. Same person? Maybe, maybe not. Oh, wait, there's a young Yankee soldier, too.
It's not a horrible book and the mystery is decent, but what bothers me is all the anti-Yankee talk without one word about how the South sucked for supporting slavery. Usually in these Southern point of view books, the lead character isn't a complete dick about slavery, but there's nary a mention of it here. That's this book's largest flaw.
You can expect something decent from the author of Julie's books and one Dear America, although others might know her better as the Just Moody author. I've never read any of those.
Glasshouse is, I think, the oldest book in the series, being set in 1621 Jamestown.
Merry is forced into indentured servitude. Like she's actually kidnapped and forced into it. She got shanghaied, but for indentured servitude in the New World, not being on a ship's crew.
Her only friend is an Italian glassblower that's a little older than her, so she gets lucky when the people to pick her for indenture are the ones that own the glasshouse.
However, she's stuck living with the complete asshole that runs the place (not owns it) and his even more assholish, abusive wife. She enjoys her time in the glasshouse though, except then things start to go bad. A batch of glass is destroyed when the fires are let to burn out in the kilns, which take weeks to heat up enough to work again. Once that's fixed, someone breaks the entire batch of finished glass, and then the owner of the glasshouse is suspiciously dead. No answers ever come in that, but I suspect the asshole wife poisoned him. Merry's pal Angelo is framed, but she takes the blame and sits in prison instead, then escapes. Shortly after, she catches the asshole wife in the act and everything comes to light. She's awarded her freedom, then learns her older sister arrived as a tobacco bride, so everything works out for her in the end.
Merry's a good character, not too weak, not overly strong as would seem anachronistic in such an early setting. The mystery was good, too, and the story moved along at a good pace.
