Heading Home: Carolina Harmony by Marilyn Taylor McDowell

Carolina reached up and felt the wood carving she wore as a pendant. She rubbed her finger over its wings and its tail, feeling where he daddy had made the cuts and where he'd sanded it smooth.

"It's a present for you, Carolina.
It's a catbird, case you couldn't tell."

She remembered that clear June night, when they were camping up near Grandfather Mountain.

"Lift your hair so I can tie a knot in the cord."

She remembered leaning into the crook of his shoulder and gazing into the night sky with the campfire crackling and blazing before them.

Fans of Anne of Green Gables, that classic tale of a red-headed, pigtailed orphan girl which celebrated its centennial last year, have a new novel of an extraordinary red-haired orphan to enjoy, in Marylyn Taylor McDowell's recent Carolina Harmony (Delacorte, 2009).

When Carolina Campbell's parents and baby brother Caleb are suddenly killed in a car accident, she moves in with her dad's foster mother, "Auntie Shen," (so called after her baby pronunciation of the Gaelic seanmhair for grandmother.) It's 1964, but life in the high mountains of western North Carolina is still primitive for that time. Auntie Shen supports them with cash from her her wild berry jams and jellies and her paintings of mountain plants and animals sold at her Morning Glory Jelly Stand. Although memories and dreams of her lost family haunt Carolina, Auntie Shen's stories of her father's boyhood and frequent "I just love ya, girl!" give her a feeling of continuity and security.

But when Auntie Shen has a stroke and is moved to a nursing home, Carolina learns what being an orphan really means. Taken away from the care of Auntie Shen's Black friend Ruby to "be with people of your own kind," Carolina is sent first to an unkind and autocratic minister's family. When Carolina runs away, she is found and moved to Boone to stay with Miss Lily Jean, a woman motivated mostly by the money she gets for fostering children. Athough befriended by Lily Jean's mischievous nephew, Russell, Carolina is frightened by her trucker husband and once more flees to the woods, finally making her way to Harmony Farm, where she is quietly taken in by Ray and Latah and their son Luke. A wonderful summer passes in which Carolina feels that she has found a family who will keep her and love her for all time.

But when Russell turns up with his Uncle Sims, come to shear the sheep at Harmony Farm, he tries to convince Carolina that Ray and Latah only keep her for her work on the farm. When Sims carelessly sets the barn on fire, Carolina is afraid that she will be blamed and, fearing that she has lost her family all over again, stows away with Russell aboard a freight train heading for Tennessee.

Strong and unique characters, a strong sense of time and place, and plenty of orphan-style adventure make this novel both a sensitive and suspenseful story. Carolina is more than lucky in her many rescuers, from the grandmotherly Ruby to the soft-hearted Knoxville beauty school student Georgia, who sweet-talks her sheriff's deputy boyfriend into giving Carolina a second chance at Harmony Farm. A bit of an old-fashioned tale of a 1960s "Annie," Carolina Harmony is an engaging story of a resourceful orphan who finally comes home to stay.

The War between Us: The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish

Only in our house, thought Amanda MacLeish, could a Friday night family Monopoly game turn into the Civil War.

And as that ironically named "Family Night" Monopoly game plays itself out to an aborted ending, we see that the MacLeish family is already a house divided. Mom grimly plays for blood; thirteen-year-old Steffi suffers through the Friday ritual in bored-teen martyrdom; Dad remains annoyingly cheerful as he steadily wins, as always; and fifth-grader Amanda tries to keep the peace as the game disintegrates into another of her parents' frequent quarrels.

Things fall apart quickly for Amanda as her father suddenly moves out of the house. At first Amanda blames her mother's inexplicable crankiness for the break. But when Amanda makes an early morning bike trip to visit her father at his motel, she is hurt and bewildered when he dad keeps the chain on the door and orders her to wait outside while he dresses to drive her right back home. Mystified at this behavior, she hears Steffi's suspicion that there is another woman involved, the truth of which is confirmed when, waiting for a classmate at the community center, she watches her father greet a pretty blond with a private but familiar kiss.

Amanda finds little comfort in the awkward silence at home and gradually becomes estranged from her best friend Beth because of her inability to talk about her family's breakup to anyone. Instead she throws herself into her social studies assignment to compose a Civil War-era journal of a Maryland farm girl named Polly Mason. In Amanda's narrative Polly, too, realizes that she lives in a house divided when her older brother Thomas volunteers for the Union Army and her fifteen-year-old brother Jeb joins a Rebel regiment in the Army of Virginia. When her brothers are listed as wounded in the early battles of the war, Amanda has Polly disguise herself as a young Paul Mason and set out on foot to search the scattered tent hospitals near the battlefield, hoping to bring her brothers home and reunite her fractured family.

Polly does learn that her brothers are alive, but not whole. Thomas has lost a leg, and Jeb an arm, and when they come together again, Polly sees that the Masons will remain a family, but a much changed one. As Amanda writes Polly's story, she also gains insight into her own altered family. A field trip to Gettysburg, with her dad surprisingly along as a chaperon, helps Amanda to make her own separate peace with Beth, with her father, and with her future in her own broken but still loving family.

In her new novel The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish notable author Claudia Mills carries off a real tour-de-force. Skillfully balancing the dual story lines of Amanda and Polly within the framework of a fifth grade class working toward a performance at the end of its Civil War unit, Claudia Mills reveals Amanda's growing understanding of the meaning of her family's split as much through her journal writing in Polly's voice as through her own experiences. The journal entries are believable as the work of a talented fifth grade writer, and in an admirable parallel of the "house divided" theme, Mills also shows continuing racial tension between two boys in Amanda's class as they read their Civil War journals aloud. It is an altogether remarkable piece of writing with few false notes, as Mills skillfully weaves the meaningful subplots into an integral part of Amanda MacLeish's own memorable story.

All this may seem a weighty structure for a middle reader novel, but as reviewer Liz Rosenberg puts it, "Despite its somber themes, Claudia Mills’s newest novel sparkles like a glass of ginger ale, peppery and sweet. Spirited Amanda blunders through mistakes that only make us love her more. A splash of American history, a dollop of friendship, a pinch of philosophy, humor, pathos, even a dash of romance --The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish has something for every young reader."