A Tale of Gold

by Thelma Hatch Wyss

Overview

GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! scream the headlines in July 1987, announcing the discovery of gold in the Yukon. Fourteen-year-old James Erickson, alone in the world after his father's death, is mesmerized when he sees the first ship of prospectors enter the San Francisco harbor. Caught up in the gold fever, he books passage on a steamer up to Alaska.

In Alaska, James meets Tip, a skinny boy who turns out to be a girl—and the only person James trusts to be his partner. Together they embark on a treacherous trek over the mountains and down the river, battling rapids, con men, and the cold. When their survival skills—and their dedication to each other—are tested, James and Tip wonder whether their exhausting journey will be worth it. Is their fortune waiting just beyond the next bend? And what are they willing to risk to find out?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439131886
Publisher:	Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication date:	05/11/2010
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
Lexile:	780L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Thelma Hatch Wyss lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the author
of Here at the Scenic-Vu Motel, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults;
Ten Miles from Winnemucca, a Junior Library Guild Selection and a
Bank Street College Best Book of the Year; and on the McElderry list,
Bear Dancer: The Story of a Ute Girl, which won the Mountains&
Plains Independent Booksellers Association Regional Book Award and was on
the New York Public Library's "100 Titles for Reading and Sharing" list.

Editorial Reviews

At 14, orphaned James leaves San Francisco to become a "stampeder" in the Yukon. He has some money and his dead father's small savings to buy a steamboat ticket to Alaska and a mining outfit once he's there. Aboard the rusty, crowded steamer, he meets people who will be his friends in the wilds and the usual assortment of con men, cheats and thieves; they, too, will reappear. The story covers the tough life in the diggings, winter, the hard work, the dangers and describes his partner, who, readers learn, is a girl disguised as a boy. Everything should be exciting as Wyss tells about the adventure, but in James's first-person narration, it is quite pedestrian. Excitement is described, never rising from the page, and the story has so many elements that the action blurs. Moreover, how did James buy about 2,000 pounds of supplies with the small amount of money he had, and how did he portage it over the Chilkoot Pass by himself? The Yukon rush of the 1890s is historic, but even when James and his companions find gold, it seems unexciting. (A map would have been a plus.) (Historical fiction. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews