I was both utterly delighted and
totally bummed when One Came Home by
Amy Timberlake was named a Newbery Honor book this past January. Delighted
because I love the book and told a few people (including other librarians) about
it. Bummed because I have had “Blog One Came Home” on my Things to Do List
since March 2013. And now everyone
was going to know about it before I blogged.
One
Came Home excites me because it’s lyrical, it
has an outstanding brave and human heroine, and it’s a quest novel. And it’s a
quest novel that is not fantasy or science fiction! In fact, it’s historical
fiction set in 1871 Wisconsin. Our heroine Georgie Burkhardt (13 years old)
begins the novel by telling us she is attending the funeral of her older sister
Agatha (18), but that she knows that Agatha hasn’t died (there wasn’t enough
left of the body found on the side of the road for a proper ID), she’s just run
away to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So, there’s Georgie’s call to action. If no one else will go
look for Agatha, she will. Georgie gets supernatural
aid in the form of Billy McCabe (19), a young man in love with Agatha.
Billy loans Georgie a mule (she asked for a horse) and then goes along with her.
The
road of trials Georgie travels on includes pigeon-nesting
sites, a cougar, more insects and bugs than she is comfortable with, a
mini-betrayal by Billy, and counterfeiters. Georgie even develops a slight
crush on Billy (a calling of the flesh).
When they reach the place where the body was found, Georgie seems to have an apotheosis – at first, she seems ready
to accept that her sister has died, but then she gets a brainstorm about what
might have happened.
The rest of the novel is chaotic (in
a good way) and thrilling (and a quest novel to the end). Georgie is a treasure. I love how she – a town girl
who has never ridden a mule before, let alone the horse she asked for – deals with
the great outdoors and uses the skills she picked up by working in the family
store to track down Agatha. She also is a crack shot, which comes in very handy
in the third part of the novel. I also love the language of this book,
especially one scene in which Georgie is describing how her sister went out
among a huge flock of pigeons and twirled with them. Or this passage where
Georgie is relishing the moment:
Pause a moment. Feel the air surround the moment. Push against it, and find it truly exists. Blow on it, and see how the tiny barbs snag the wind and lift. Watch it fly.
Amy Timberlake has set this story
against the backdrop of a huge passenger pigeon migration. Sadly, as Timberlake
states in her author’s note, passenger pigeons are now extinct. They once
numbered in the billions, she writes, but the last one died in 1914. (Even
Timberlake’s author’s note is beautifully written, by the way.)
Highly recommended.
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