It's Monday - Adventures in Books!

              Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they've been reading, along with others who post their favorites.  Your TBR lists will grow! Happy Reading!
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Thinking of all of you during this challenging time, hope you are doing well and finding joy in your lives every day.





           It took me a while to read this, not because it wasn't a special adventure story set in the California gold rush days, but because of the challenging days we're experiencing. I'm fine, staying home except for a few trips to the grocery, but feel a little scattered! 
           However, this story by Avi is quite a wonderful trip back to the San Francisco of Gold Rush days where a young girl, Victoria Blaisdell of Providence, Rhode Island whose father has lost his job and gets the 'fever', opts to take only her younger brother along to California. "Tory" wants independence and hates the expectations of a 14-year-old girl, no school but dancing school, act like a lady, no outings without accompaniment. 

Thanks to Candlewick Press for the copy!

            Readers will be thrilled to see that Tory won't be stopped. She stows away on the ship, thus beginning the adventure that is not always easy, but her strength does not stop her will to be who she wants to be. You'll be surprised at the terrible conditions of that old San Francisco, most living in tents, mud everywhere, no schools for the younger brother whom Tory is left in charge of as her father takes off to the goldfields. It's a tale hard to imagine, but Avi says there really was a Blaisdell family that lived in Providence and his descriptions of "Rotten Row" where hundreds of ships were abandoned in the bay as men arrived to take off for the fields nearly defy belief. Those wrecks now at the bay's bottom have since served as a landfill for what is now land extended into the bay.
            Tory makes one good friend, a boy, and then another, who help her rescue her brother who's been 'crimped', kidnapped to serve on one of the few ships that leave for other destinations.