Newbery Award-winning author Karen Cushman paints a vivid picture of life in the gold fields.
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is her firsthand account of her struggles in a rough and tumble land. With each day, the homesick Lucy is more and more determined to take life into her own hands and return to New England. There are no books, no school-nothing but dust and drunken miners. Reaching California, the Whipples set up a crude boardinghouse, and Lucy is put to work washing, cleaning, and baking pies in the rough mining town of Lucky Diggins. Moving is the last thing the outspoken twelve-year-old, Lucy, wants to do.
Desperately wanting to control something in her own life, she decides to be called Lucy, and as Lucy she grows and changes in her strange and challenging new environment.In the summer of 1849, Lucy Whipple's mother packs up her household and her two young children, and leaves their home in Massachusetts for the gold fields of California. When California Morning Whipple’s widowed mother uproots her family from their comfortable Massachusetts environs and moves them to a rough mining camp called Lucky Diggins in the Sierras, California Morning resents the upheaval. But Lucy California Morning Whipple may be in for a surprise - because home is a lot closer than she thinks… So Lucy vows to be plain miserable until she can hightail it back East where she belongs. Worst of all, there’s no lending library! Dag diggety! Even the gold her mama claimed was just lying around in the fields isn’t panning out. For Lucy, Lucky Diggins is hardly a town at all - just a bunch of ramshackle tents and tobacco-spitting miners.
And now her brother, Butte, and sisters, Prairie and Sierra, seem to be Westerners at heart, too. But moving out West to Lucky Diggins, California, was her mama’s dream-come-true. I know you will understand.Ĭalifornia doesn’t suit Lucy Whipple-not the name, not the place. I cannot hate California and be California. Please do not address yours truly as California anymore, California Morning Whipple being a foolish name for a duck much less a girl.
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