Hi, Ho, Come to the Fair: Will Sparrow's Road by Karen Cushman

I care for no one but myself and nothing but my belly!"

Twelve-year-old Will Sparrow travels light, as befits a runaway, and his philosophy lies even lighter upon his conscience.

Abandoned by his mother and sold to a cruel tavern keeper for all the ale he can drink by his drunkard father, Will swipes one too many meat pies from the kitchen and faces a short-lived future as a chimney-sweeper's boy, and he is only saved from that fate by the quickness of his heels. Will hits the road with nothing but a horse blanket stolen from his master's barn and a bag of apples pillaged from an orchard and whatever provender he can find to fill his belly along the way.

And on that road to he knows not where, Will encounters other wanderers--Nell Liftpurse, who steals his boots, his blanket, and his apples to boot, a larcenous tooth-puller who offers him a meal in trade for pretending to have a tooth pulled painlessly, a conjurer with lying legerdemain, and a kindly stout man with a trained pig named Duchess, who feeds him and takes him along to a fair.

For a self-proclaimed liar and thief, Will finds a town the most likely place to provide provender, and as the spires of a promising minster rise in the distance, he finds the road becoming crowded with beggars, pilgrims, peddlers, and wanderers like himself.

"What town be this?" Will asked a metalsmith with cooking pots and warming pans tied to his donkey.

"It be Peterborough. Or Scarborough" the metalsmith answered. "Or mayhap Foxborough or Dogbourough. 'Tis some borough, I believe."

"Tis a fine fair, I hear. Three days long. Goods aplenty to buy for those with coins, and smells to smell for those without."

Hoping to pinch a loaf from a busy baker or cadge a copper from someone needing an extra hand setting up a booth, Will eagerly enters the town and indeed does find employment with a seemingly kind presenter of "curiosities and wonders" who promises him tuppence a day and dinner for his work as wagon driver and shill for his show. Will finds himself among  assorted oddities claimed to be a one-eyed pig, a unicorn's skull, and a sea monster skeleton, and a baby mermaid in a flask. But chief among the exhibits are a bad-tempered dwarf named FitzGeoffory, and the fur-faced cat-girl who calls herself Grace Wyse.

At first Will thinks his new master a fair man and his living prodigies freakish and frightening. But as he works with them, and they move on to Ely Fair, Will learns a new lesson, that things are not always what they seem, and when Tidball tries to sell Grace to innkeeper, beating poor Fitz mercilously when he defends the child, Will has to come to their aid. He shoves Tidball down, his head hitting rock, and Will fears that he will be hanged by the sheriff for murder.

But as Will hits the road alone again, he begins to think.

Would the law take Fitz and Grace and punish them?

Fitz and Grace were oddities, easy to accuse. Will's face flushed with shame. He had left them to take the blame.

But he cared for no one but himself, did he not?

Faced with a choice between human ties and self-protection, Will Sparrow takes a new road in Karen Cushman's forthcoming Will Sparrow's Road (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2012). Cushman, a two-time Newbery winner for her outstanding historical fiction (CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY and The Midwife's Apprentice) breaks some new ground with her first boy protagonist, moving from medieval to Elizabethan England, to tell of the nonstop adventures of Will Sparrow, whose fleet feet and quick wits belie the good heart which lead him finally to the home and family he longs for. A coming-of-age story set in a very different time from our own, this tale of Cushman's makes this world come alive for middle readers.

An appended Author's Note provides a history of fairs from prehistory through the twentieth century, where the sideshow of freaks and wonders persisted until recently in our own regional state and county fairs and carnivals.  Cushman also provides a extensive bibliography of related titles for middle readers.

In the Beginning: The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

What Mr. Harinton was doing certainly helped Nicholas--but it also simply felt right to Nicholas.

No sooner had he thought this than he realized what was anchoring his happiness. It was purpose. He knew what he wanted to do.

Nicholas had something to aim for now.

He might not know what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew with absolute certainty how he wanted to be.

At the very least, he knew where to begin.

With three very sucessful series books behind him, author Trenton Lee Stewart takes us back to the beginning of the The Mysterious Benedict Society, the backstory behind benefactor Nicholas Benedict himself, in his recent prequel, The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict (The Mysterious Benedict Society) (Little, Brown, 2012).

The orphaned Nicholas Benedict has been dismissed from the waif's home where he has lived because his narcolepsy and screaming nightmares have caused untenable "administrative problems." In a Jane Eyre-style arrival amid a gloomy rain, Nicholas is driven from the station by the uncommunicative Mr. Collum, who seems displeased with the problems the nine-year-old Nicholas brings and preternaturally absorbed with the matter of an ancient, hand-written ledger from which his new charge seems an annoying distraction. Upon arrival at the dark and gloomy Rothchild's End, Nicholas is quickly shown the a dark windowless and crowded storeroom where his sole comfort is a cot and blanket, where Mr. Collum observes that Nicholas will be locked up nightly so that his sleepwalking and nightmares will not cause problems for the other student inmates.

As Mr. Collum relocks the door and escorts Nicholas to the bathroom before bedtime, however, Nicholas manages to convince the headmaster that he needs to use the key to get his forgotten toothbrush, and making use of the melted wax in the guttering hallway candle's sconce, he quickly makes a wax impression of Mr. Collum's key, which he happily speculates is a skeleton key that will unlock many doors in 'Child's End manor.

Nicholas is indeed a lad of many talents besides persuasion. He is a natural speed reader with a photographic memory and a lightning-quick mind, and after fashioning a duplicate key in metals crafting class, Nicholas decides that he will spend part of every night in the school's well-stocked library. Observing the headmaster serriptitonsly knocking on wooden panels in various rooms, Nicholas intuits that he is searching for some sort of hidden treasure and determines to give some of his midnight explorations over to deciphering the meaning of that old ledger-journal which Mr. Collum keeps locked in his office.

Indeed, there is an intriguing mystery there, the whereabouts of the inheritance of the mistress of the manor, Mrs. Rothchild. Nicholas Benedict believes that if he can find and claim what the journal calls her "treasure," it will be his escape from interminable years in institutions such as this one is turning out to be.

And while not quite the Dickensian orphanage where Oliver Twist suffered, "Child's End is aptly named for a boy like Nicholas. Befriended by only one boy, John Cole, Nicholas is shunned by the others because of his far-ranging vocabulary and his peculiar narcoleptic attacks, and little Nick also is selected for tormenting as the perennial victim of the school bullies, the "Spiders," seemingly under the noses of short-sighted and overburdened staff, including only an extremely myopic nurse, an elderly and arthritic housekeeper a equally superannuated cook, a reclusive caretaker/gardener, and a part-time schoolmaster.

Nicholas pins his hopes on discovering that treasure, and deduces from the accounts in the ledger than the Rothschilds had constructed an elaborate personal astronomiocal observatory on a hill in the area, and equipped with a lantern and alarm clock he has rebuilt from discards in the cellar and storeroom, Nicholas moves his midnight mission outdoors and eventually locates the abandoned observatory, where he is certain the treasure must be hidden. As time goes by, he confides in John and later in Violet,the deaf daughter of the local farmer whom the two meet in their nocturnal ramblings. Nicholas enlists both as confederates in the quest and the three hang their hopes on that treasure, a means to art school for Violet and an escape from orphanage life for John and Nicholas.

But as Nicholas Benedict's research and investigations continue, his simple theory of Mrs. Rothchild's vanished fortune is confounded, and the actual truth that he ultimately discovers changes everything for Nicholas forever.

Fans of the Mysterious Benedict Society's quirky young heroes and heroines will be fascinated by that peculiar Society's founder's childhood story and how the Society's own mission came to be. Stewart's narrative is as darkly atmospheric and labyrinthine as their midnight rambles, reminiscent as it is not only to Harry Potter's dark nighttime forays at Hogworts but also to the many Gothic mysteries of the late John Bellairs and the resourceful orphan family in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events> Hard-core readers of the series will find the young Nicholas Benedict a delightfully off-beat character, from whom the redoubtable Benedict Society springs.

Previous books in this series include The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, The Mysterious Benedict Society: Mr. Benedict's Book of Perplexing Puzzles, Elusive Enigmas, and Curious Conundrums,
and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

"Such Things As Dreams:" William S. and the Great Escape by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The weepy eyes were no surprise. But what he certainly hadn't foreseen was how the conversation began. The first words out of Jancy's mouth were, "Look here, William, I know you're getting ready to run away. You are, aren't you?"

Puzzled, William shrugged. "Well, yeah, I guess so. Sooner or later."

"I'm just plain finished with being a Baggett," she told William fiercely. "So I'm going to run away, too, as soon as ever I can."

With those brave words from Jancy, the great escape is set in motion.

William has taken the middle initial S from his idol, William Shakespeare, hoping that the placement of the Bard's last name will separate him from his last name, from his coarse and cruel father and half-siblings who make his life miserable. But when the older Baggett boys drown little sister Trixie's guinea pig in the toilet as a prank, Jancy insists that it's time for her and William and their little siblings Buddy and Trixie to try to escape to the refuge of their mother's sister, Aunt Fiona, on the California coast. Big Ed Baggett has no love or concern for his four youngest, but keeps them around for the "Depression dollars" their presence earns to support his slothful lifestyle.

Twelve-year-old William has been saving his earnings for years, planning to run away when he's old enough to blend into the general population, but the addition of ten-year-old Jancy, six-year-old Trixie, and four-year-old Buddy makes it almost impossible to make an inconspicuous escape. But at Jancy's prodding, the four kids steal away in the dark hours before dawn, hiding in ditches from the occasional passing car, with a wagon loaded with their belongings. Seeking concealment during the day by means of an open cellar door, the runaways are discovered by the teenaged Clarice, a well-to-do but emotionally needy daughter of work-absorbed lawyer parents, who secretly takes the family in to satisfy her own loneliness and her love for the drama of the venture, feeding and hiding them well, all the while trying to keep them with her for daytime company.

But William knows that their presence will be discovered by her parents soon, and the kids make another pre-dawn flight, this time from Clarice's cellar, and manage to take a bus which will drop them only a few miles from their aunt's house. But William is sure that they have been spotted by a roughneck friend of the Baggett boys, and even Aunt Fiona's fond welcome doesn't allay his fears that the Baggetts will soon be hard on their trail. Hopefully, they set up an emergency hideaway under the eaves, entered through a tiny door in their aunt's closet, but when the Baggetts do track them down, they are dragged out, beaten, and returned to their old lives with their worthless family.

All seems lost but for Clarice, who resolutely puts together left-behind clues as to Aunt Fiona's address and eventually pulls her high-powered parents into her mission to restore the four children to a real home with their aunt and a chance for a decent life. "All's well that ends well," and three-time Newbery winner Zilpha Keatley Snyder's William S. and the Great Escape (Atheneum, 2009) blends quirky but appealing characters and an exciting "road story" into a fast-moving and poignant novel for middle readers who like their adventures on the historical side.