Bound To Stay Bound

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Booklist - 10/15/2010 *Starred Review* After a life of riding the rails with her father, 12-year-old Abilene can’t understand why he has sent her away to stay with Pastor Shady Howard in Manifest, Missouri, a town he left years earlier; but over the summer she pieces together his story. In 1936, Manifest is a town worn down by sadness, drought, and the Depression, but it is more welcoming to newcomers than it was in 1918, when it was a conglomeration of coal-mining immigrants who were kept apart by habit, company practice, and prejudice. Abilene quickly finds friends and uncovers a local mystery. Their summerlong “spy hunt” reveals deep-seated secrets and helps restore residents’ faith in the bright future once promised on the town’s sign. Abilene’s first-person narrative is intertwined with newspaper columns from 1917 to 1918 and stories told by a diviner, Miss Sadie, while letters home from a soldier fighting in WWI add yet another narrative layer. Vanderpool weaves humor and sorrow into a complex tale involving murders, orphans, bootlegging, and a mother in hiding. With believable dialogue, vocabulary and imagery appropriate to time and place, and well-developed characters, this rich and rewarding first novel is “like sucking on a butterscotch. Smooth and sweet.” - Copyright 2010 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 11/01/2010 Abilene Tucker can’t figure out why an infected cut on her leg, which healed up just fine, should have prompted her father to send her off to live in his old hometown-Manifest, Kansas-in the care of “Shady” Howard, a saloon-owner-turned-preacher who took care of him as a boy. A box of letters tucked under a floorboard sheds indirect light on the Manifest townsfolk back in her father’s day, and some old local newspaper tattle columns and the stories of “The Hungarian Woman” who runs a fortune-telling business slowly help Abilene to make some sense of how issues in Manifest from 1918 (World War I, the Spanish influenza, Prohibition, labor relations in the coal mining industry) are interwoven with the current issues of 1936, particularly the ongoing Great Depression. But where does Abilene’s father, Gideon, fit into all this? The pieces fall into place when Abilene figures out that “Jinx,” one of the correspondents of the letters, was actually Gideon in his youth, and she realizes that her father has entrusted her to a community that will embrace and nurture her as lovingly as it once did orphaned Gideon. In this debut novel, Vanderpool creates a fictional town with a fully believable history, populated with characters as notable for their warmth as their eccentricity. Each member of the sprawling cast is so robustly developed that the summary list of characters from 1918 and 1936 provided by the author is hardly needed. Ingeniously plotted and gracefully told, this father/daughter tale will resonate with any reader who’s ever wondered whether those old family stories really tell the whole truth. EB - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

School Library Journal - 11/01/2010 Gr 5–8—History and fiction marry beautifully in this lively debut novel. It's as if readers jump off the train in Manifest, KS, in 1936 with Abilene Tucker, 12, the feisty, likable, and perceptive narrator. She is there to live with Pastor Shady Howard, her father's friend, while her father works on the railroad back in Iowa. An equally important story set during World War I is artfully intertwined. Since her mother went off on her own 10 years earlier, Abilene and Gideon have been alone. Though their life together is unsettled, their bond is strong. Shady's place is shabby, but he is welcoming. The mystery about Manifest and Gideon unfolds after Abilene finds a box filled with intriguing keepsakes. It includes a letter dated 1917 to someone named Jinx from Ned Gillen that has a warning, "THE RATTLER is watching." This starts Abilene, with the help of new friends Ruthanne and Lettie, on a search to learn the identity of the pair. The story cleverly shifts back and forth between the two eras. Abilene becomes connected to Miss Sadie, a "diviner" who slowly leads her through the story of Ned and Jinx. Though the girl is lonely, she adjusts to her new life, feeling sure that her father will come for her at summer's end. The Ku Klux Klan and its campaign against the many immigrants working in the coal mines and the deplorable conditions and exploitation of these men provide important background. This thoroughly enjoyable, unique page-turner is a definite winner.—Renee Steinberg, formerly at Fieldstone Middle School, Montvale, NJ - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

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