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Narrated by Jessalyn Gilsig
Jennifer L. HolmUnabridged — 6 hours, 15 minutes
Narrated by Jessalyn Gilsig
Jennifer L. HolmUnabridged — 6 hours, 15 minutes
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Boston Jane: The Claim by Jennifer L. Holm, continues Jane's ongoing frontier adventures in the Pacific Northwest. Her world turns tumultuous when Sally Biddle, her debutante nemesis, arrives at Shoalwater Bay intent on destroying Jane's life. Moreover, Jane must contend with her ex-fiance's attempts to turn the settlers against the native Chinooks. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Gr 6 Up-Fans of this series, set in Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory in the 1850s, will find Jane, now 17, to be just as strong and admirable a character as ever. In this third installment, the frontier settlement has grown into a town and Jane works as a concierge in the hotel. Her old rival, Sally Biddle, disembarks ship and immediately takes every opportunity to embarrass and alienate Jane just as she had done back in Philadelphia. William Baldt, the man who asked Jane to marry him in the first book, is back and threatens to take her land. She surprises some community members when she speaks up for a wrongly accused Chinook who is charged with stealing whiskey, and she bravely rescues a child of Chinook and white heritage who is unfairly placed with an abusive foster parent. A touch of romance between Jane and Jehu, the sailor she met on her journey west, helps move the story to a satisfying conclusion. This glimpse into Northwestern pioneer life is based on primary and secondary sources, including Holm's own family history. Recommend this title to readers who enjoyed L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series (HarperCollins).-Jean Gaffney, Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library, Miamisburg, OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
In the third installment of her trilogy about Boston Jane, Holm continues the drama of white settlers in the Washington Territory, some of whom embrace the Chinook way of life and many of whom disdain their so-called "savage" ways. This familiar conflict rears its ugly head when a child of a Chinook Indian mother and a white father who has died, is taken away from the mother to be raised by a white family. Additional aspects of settlement life include the coming of a dry-goods store, first elections, and fraudulent land schemes. Jane, who had uprooted herself from Philadelphia and found friendship and promise in this rough new community, now faces a new threat, not the physical danger of murderers and the frontier, but the supercilious and disdainful ways of Sally Biddle, her old Philadelphia nemesis. She is less successful in overcoming the proper Ms. Biddle and, in fact, needs the familiar plot device of a letter left lying about to achieve victory. That victory is a proposal of marriage from the handsome Jehu. While this is not as compelling as the previous two titles, Jane's fans will delight in the turn of events and celebrate with her. (Fiction. 10-14)
| BN ID: | 2940169175493 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2010 |
| Series: | Boston Jane , #1 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 8 - 11 Years |
Papa always said you make your own luck.
But after being seasick for five months, two weeks, and six days, I felt certain that luck had nothing to do with anything aboard the Lady Luck, a poorly named vessel if ever there was one. I had just spent the morning of my sixteenth birthday puking into a bucket, and I had little hope that the day would improve.
I had no doubt that I was the unluckiest young lady in the world.
It wasn’t always this way.
Once I was the luckiest girl in the world.
When I was eleven years old, in 1849, the sea seemed to me a place of great wonder. I would lie on my four-poster bed in my room overlooking the street and pretend I was on one of the sleek ships that sailed along the waterfront, returning from exotic, faraway places like China and the Sandwich Islands and Liverpool. When the light shone through the window a certain watery way, it was easy to imagine that I was bobbing gently on the waves of the ocean, the air around me warm and sweet and tinged with salt.
We lived on Walnut Street, in a brick house with green shutters, just steps from the State House. Heavy silk drapes hung in the windows, and there was new gas lighting in every room. When the lights were on, it glowed like fairyland. I believed it to be the loveliest house in all of Philadelphia, if only because we lived there.
And my father was the most wonderful father in Philadelphia—or perhaps the whole world.
Each morning Papa would holler, “Where is my favorite daughter?”
I would leap out of bed and rush to the top of the stairs, my feet bare, my hair a frightful mess.
“She is right here!” I would shout. “And she is your only daughter!”
“You’re not my Janey,” he would roar, his white beard shaking, his belly rolling with laughter. “My Janey’s not a slugabed! My Janey’s hair is never tangled!”
My mother had died giving birth to me, so it had only ever been Papa and me. Papa always said that one wild, redheaded daughter was enough for any sane man.
As for my sweet papa, how can I describe the wisest of men? Imagine all that is good and dear and generous, and that was my papa.
Papa was a surgeon, the finest in all of Philadelphia. He took me on rounds with him to visit his patients. I was always proud to hold the needle and thread while he stitched up a man who had been beaten in a bar brawl. Or I would sit on a man’s belly while Papa set a broken leg. Papa said a man behaved better and didn’t scream so much when a little girl was sitting on his belly.
I was the luckiest girl.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
