Where the Heart Is: A Rambler Steals Home by Carter Higgins

"Aren't we lucky?" Garland asked. "Just traveling souls, making traditions and cheeseburgers." I didn't really know if I believed that part, but I sure could believe in the summer's traditions.

Garland always said being a rambler of the road meant food, family, and fun. Triple and I always said it meant three other things--blisters, grease splatters, and loneliness. But there we were, rambling back to Ridge Creek for another summer.

Eleven-year-old Derby's dad, Garland, has a bad case of wander-foot. For most of the year they take their Rambler, towing a grill, from autumn fairs and pumpkin festivals to Christmas tree lots, and on through the spring carnivals, but summer always brings them right back to Ridge Creek, Virginia, parking in the grass between the Heritage Inn and the Ridge Creek Rockskippers baseball stadium. Garland is happiest on the road. He cheerfully homeschools Derby and little brother Triple and mans the grill, selling hamburgers with fried onions and the newest big thing, sweet potato fries. But since her mother left, years ago, Derby has longed for a real home, not one on wheels, and for her the old, faded Rockskippers Stadium is like home, where everything and everyone is the same, especially June Mattingly, her summertime mother.

Right away, she spots the sign taped to the fence.

Welcome back, Sugar Sue.

Only one person called me that.

The Rockskippers Stadium is still wonderful, a bit more shabby, its paint a bit more faded, but what is different this year is June. Instead of inviting her to sit on her porch for lemonade and raisin cookies, her sign tells Derby to meet her in the ticket booth, where June works all summer. June is warm and welcoming, but to Derby something seems different.

The old baseball park is just about the same, and the secret space between the fence planks where Derby and her friend Marcus squeeze through is still there. The creek is there, cool and full of turtles for Triple to catch, and Betsy and Lolly, the town mean girls, are still there, looking down their noses at Derby. Candy Plogger is still plotting to win the best dessert contest with her apple pies. But between smiles, June seems sad, and her once neat flower-filled front yard has been taken over by weeds. Even her front door is faded and peeling its paint.

Derby soon learns that June's husband Franklin, has died. Derby's friend, Marcus has taken over the grounds-keeping job, suddenly seeming more serious and grown-up, and he, too, sees that the life seems to have gone out of June, and she is just not the same. And so, for Derby, Ridge Creek is not the same.

Franklin Mattingly had broad shoulders, massive hands, and an even bigger heart. Players came and went, and the teenagers who sold peanuts left for college. But Franklin was always there. The first to show up and the last to go.

But Derby needs June, and soon decides that June needs her. Together she and Marcus make a plan to get rid of the weeds in June's yard and plant flowers and paint and decorate her door in a perfect pink, hoping that some fixing up will help with June's grief. Little by little, others join in the effort, even Betsy and Lolly, who work out big letters, spelling out something secret, and a tricky wave motion from the crowd in the stadium for what turns out to be a big town salute to June.

WE LOVE YOU JUNE

WELCOME HOME

The James Edward Allen Gibbs Stadium was on its feet, cheering from the bullpens to the nosebleeds. When June saw me waiting at home plate, it felt like looking into a mirror. We had the same broken heart, sewn up, and weaved back together.

Derby comes home, in Carter Higgins' A Rambler Steals Home (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). With a main character whose reality is far from the lifestyle of most middle readers, this debut novel has a lot to say about the universal need for a place in the heart, a place to belong. Derby Christmas Clark is different sort of character, but one which readers will recognize in themselves, and the world of Ridge Creek is a rich background for this story about love and community and the need of the human heart to call some place home.

Homefront: Lizzie and the Lost Baby by Cheryl Blackford

Every window on the rain had been painted black, blocking any possible view of the passing scenery. Lizzie knew the paint was necessary to hide the train's lights from the German planes, but she wished she could see outside.

"This is our stop, children" said Mrs. Scruton. Lizzie picked up their suitcase and poked Peter when he almost left his gas mask on the seat.

The train, their last connection to home, pulled out of the station and disappeared into the misty distance.

It is the early days of World War II in England. Their father has already gone to the army, and her mother has to work in a defense plant, and because of the sure danger from German bombings, ten-year-old Lizzie and seven-year-old Peter are evacuated from the industrial city of Hull. Along with the children in their school, they are transplanted, in the term of the time, "for the duration" to the tiny village of Swainedale in Yorkshire. Lizzie and Peter are assigned to a middle-aged couple, Fred, a kindly-seeming policeman, and his gruff wife Madge, but after they trudge a rainy mile into the countryside, Madge delivers them to the house next to theirs with their deeply depressed daughter Elsie.

"You're to stay next door with our Elsie. She's not well. Mind you, don't upset her," Madge ordered."

Life in Swainedale looks to be grim, and although Lizzie tries to set a good example for Peter, spending time in the bomb shelter in their back garden with Mum looks better than life in Swainedale. A sign in the shop window in the village doesn't help.

GOVERNMENT SAYS
WE'RE IN FOR A LONG WAR.
RATIONING COMING SOON.

How long was a long war? Would it be weeks or months? Would the war last until Christmas? Lizzie couldn't imagine being away from home for that long.

Elsie's house is cold, dark, and silent, and Lizzie and Peter share not only a tiny room, but the only bed. Breakfast is watery porridge, and the shepherd's pie has no meat like Mummy's.

Then the two of them find a baby squalling lustily under a tree in a nearby field. Lizzie takes her home, and Elsie seems suddenly to come to life. She calls the baby "Alice" and seems to return to herself, caring for the baby tenderly. But the next day Lizzie meets up with Elijah, a gypsy boy searching desperately for his baby sister Rose, whom he had been ordered to leave behind while he helped a bully check his rabbit snares.

Lizzie knows that it is wrong to steal a baby and lie about it, but Madge and Fred fear the gypsies camped nearby and insist that the baby is better off with Elsie, whose own baby had died. But Lizzie knows what separation means to a family, and she bravely determines that she must be the one to return baby Rose to her real mother.

Cheryl Blackford's just published Lizzie and the Lost Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) features a resilient heroine trying to deal with being removed from everything she knows, as over three million English evacuee children did in that era. Blackford uses the setting skillfully to set forth her theme of honesty and empathy, developing the fellow-feeling between Lizzie and Elijah, both trying to keep their family together in an unusual time in history, and she references Lizzie's favorite book, The Secret Garden, as Lizzie sees the parallel between its heroine Mary, removed from her home and set down among strangers, and her own situation. Beneath the outward sternness of their foster family, Lizzie's courage uncovers kindness and human understanding, and the reader knows that Lizzie and Peter are going be all right "for the duration."

For middle readers, Blackford makes the situation of child evacuees, refugees in their own land, come real, even appending a glossary of Yorkshire words for the reader.