Adventure for Girls: Boston Jane by Jennifer L. Holm

Newbery Honor author Jennifer Holm creates a character in Boston Jane: An Adventure who is torn between two cultures. After a childhood of benign neglect by her surgeon father, in which she roamed freely with her housekeeper's son in 1840's Philadelphia, Jane determines to make herself into a proper lady of the time, primarily because of her infatuation with William, her father's handsome medical apprentice. Jane attends Mrs. Hepplewhite's Young Ladies' Academy, where she masters sewing, embroidery, music, and ettiquette. When William goes west to Oregon to seek his fortune, he eventually responds to her hopeful letters and invites her to join him as his wife at Shoalwater Bay on the Oregon coast.

Jane, now fifteen, secures her father's permission, if not blessing, and hastily sews her wedding gown and sets sail aboard the Lady Luck, a misnamed bark if ever there was one. The trip takes fifteen months, and Jane sees her maid Mary and the cabin boy Samuel buried at sea, fights off rats and fleas, and becomes dirty and bedraggled by the voyage's end. Newly turned sixteen and thin and pale from the ordeal, she disembarks to find that William has given up on her arrival and gone off into the wilderness as an Indian agent.

Nicknamed "Boston Jane" by the Chinook Indians, who give all Americans the first name "Boston," Jane gradually gives up all pretensions to being a proper Philadelphia lady. When the cow eats her dresses as they dry in the sun, Jane barters for Indian garb and learns to mend and cook to support herself among the rowdy and hard-living adventurers who make up the white population at Shoalwater As the only white female in the camp, Jane needs all her resolve to make her way as she hopes for William's return.

When William finally returns, she learns that he has taken an half-breed Indian girl as his bride in order to qualify for a timber claim, and Jane realizes that she herself had been intended only for that role. Financed with the returns from her oyster business with another settler, Jane turns to Jehu, a sailor who had befriended her aboard the Lady Luck and boards his ship bound for San Francisco, realizing, as Jehu had told her, "you make your own good luck out here, Miss Peck."

Jennifer Holm, whose Newbery book Our Only May Amelia, was also set in Oregon, carefully researched the written records of the Schoalwater Bay area, making the author of its early history, James Swan, a character in this novel and incorporating details from her own family's stories. Jane's story is continued in Boston Jane: Wilderness Days and Boston Jane: The Claim. Jane's story of survival in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest makes for a fast-paced, colorful, and historically accurate adventure story for girls.