History Mystery: Midnight in Lonesome Hollow: A Kit Mystery by Kathleen Ernst

The hard times of the Great Depression have spread even to the ridges and hollows of the Kentucky mountains, and as Kit Kittredge travels south from Cincinnati with her schoolteacher Aunt Millie, she finds her aunt's old students struggling to make ends meet. The coal mines which once provided jobs to the mountain men are closing, and without them their schools and stores are standing empty.

Despite the closure of the Mountain Hollow school where she taught, Aunt Millie has recruited Kit to help her distribute used books to the families living up the branches and in the hollows of her district. Traveling on muleback up trails and creek beds, Millie and Kit find two families, headed by a grandmother and a widowed mother, struggling to get by on the produce of their hillside gardens. Kit's friend Fern Craig is too distracted by her family's hard times to enjoy a story, and even Millie has a hard time coaxing a song from the talented singer.

But when a social anthropologist from Chicago, Lucy Vanderpool, arrives in the area, Kit, who has been keeping her own notebook of local sayings and phrases, is intrigued by her mission to photograph and record the crafts and folkways of the region, and Dr. Vanderpool asks Kit to become her assistant as she hauls her old camera and recording devices around the hollows.

Both Dr. Vanderpool and Kit hope that their studies will open the way for families to market their crafts and music to add to their incomes. But while some people welcome her interest in their basketry and quilts, Kit is alarmed when someone breaks Lucy's photographic plates and destroys the notebooks in which she and Kit have carefully recorded their observations. Kit knows there are only a few people who could be guilty of the vandalism, and she particularly suspects Fern's secretive and hostile older brother. At last she confides her fears to Fern and the two decide to follow Harlan over the dark mountain to discover the secrets behind his midnight rambles.

In Kathleen Ernst's Midnight in Lonesome Hollow: A Kit Mystery (American Girl Mysteries), many details of rural life during the Depression are worked into the suspenseful story of Kit's summer in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Kentucky. Backmatter provides period photos and information on life in Appalachia during the 1930's and the work of folklorists who preserved knowledge of the handicrafts, music, and ways of these proud people.

Kit Kittredge's Depression-era story is also continued in Danger At The Zoo: A Kit Mystery (American Girl Mysteries).

The feature-length movie, Kitt Kittredge, An American Girl, based on American Girl's orginal Depression era series by Valerie Tripp, premiered to good reviews June 16. Newsweek's reviewer David Ansen gives the movie, especially the work of star Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), thumbs up for general audiences. Ansen concludes, "As role models go, an aspiring girl journalist with a dawning social conscience beats Barbie any day."

Go here to see the complete review and view the movie's trailer. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl opens July 2.