She ably displays the roots of this kind of story, where we can see ourselves in failure, and as we wish we could be in success. Resolving a maze of adolescent conflicts with her mother, 13-year old Lucy gains maturity in spite of her frustrations, learns to trust herself, and struggles with a most difficult choice at the story's climax. In the months of spring and summer, Lucy encounters death, new friends in strange places, secrets, prejudice, and evil. Young people's author Karen Cushman, in her third book, provides a rich cast of characters for Lucy's (Jena Malone) learning experiences: traveling preacher Robert Pastorelli, Sheriff Wilford Brimley, Meat Loaf as a cowboy poet and even a cross-dressing prospector. She brings her three children to a California mining town: a patch of buildings, tents, mud, and rough people on a hillside. Here Karen Cushman helps the American Gold Rush spring to colorful life, just as she did for medieval England in her previous two books, Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice, which won Newbery Honor status and a Newbery Medal respectively.Lucy's mother (Glenn Close) acts on her long-held dream of moving west from Massachusetts after the death of her husband. 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. 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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