Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 1996)

Starred Review With zest and wit, Cushman gives us the domestic side of the western frontier adventure--what it was like for women and especially children. Just as in her Newbery Medal winner and Honor Book about medieval England, her hero is a young girl who names herself and tries to find her place in a rough, raucous world. Lucy tells her story in the first person and in occasional letters to her grandparents back home in Massachusetts: how she hates being stuck out in the California wilderness with her bossy, widowed mother, who dragged her family there and is running a boardinghouse for bellowing miners in a town knee-deep in dirt. Cushman's research shows at times, but there's joy in the daily details (bread made with flour and water, with a drop of molasses to kill the taste of weevils) and in the tall-tale exaggeration of Lucy's narrative (she lives in a space so small I can lie in bed and stir the beans on the stove without getting up ). There's sadness, too, as when her younger brother becomes sick and dies, and there's no doctor to help. In fact, the tone is reminiscent of Chaplin's movie The Gold Rush with its mixture of farce and pathos. Many readers will recognize their own dislocations in Lucy's reluctant adventure. n a vividly written afterword, Cushman places Lucy's personal narrative in its historical context. (Reviewed Aug. 1996)

Starred Review for Publishers Weekly (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

In a voice so heartbreakingly bitter that readers can taste her homesickness, California Morning Whipple describes her family's six-year stay in a small mining town during the Gold Rush. Her mother, a restless widow with an acid tongue, has uprooted her children from their home in Massachusetts to make a new life in Lucky Diggins. California rebels by renaming herself Lucy and by hoarding the gold dust and money she earns baking dried apple and vinegar pies, saving up for a journey home. Over years of toil and hardship, Lucy realizes, somewhat predictably, that home is wherever she makes one. As in her previous books, Newbery Award winner Cushman (The Midwife's Apprentice) proves herself a master at establishing atmosphere. Here she also renders serious social issues through sharply etched portraits: a runaway slave who has no name of his own, a preacher with a congregation of one, a raggedy child whose arms are covered in bruises. The writing reflects her expert craftsmanship; for example, Lucy's brother Butte, dead for lack of a doctor, is eulogized thus: """"He was eleven years old, could do his sums, and knew fifty words for liquor."""" A coming-of-age story rich with historical flavor. Ages 10-14. (Aug.)

Horn Book (Mon Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1996)

Set in California during the Gold Rush years, Cushman's third novel retains her theme of a young feminist searching for a place to call home. Twelve-year-old Lucy tells her story as the only member of her family distraught about having to move to California from Massachusetts. Her language energizes and humanizes this story of the women and children who came not to strike it rich but to tame the land for their home.

Kirkus Reviews

The recent Newbery medalist plunks down two more strong-minded women, this time in an 1849 mining camp—a milieu far removed from the Middle Ages of her first novels, but not all that different when it comes to living standards. Arvella Whipple and her three children, Sierra, Butte, and 11-year-old California Morning, make a fresh start in Lucky Diggins, a town of mud, tents, and rough-hewn residents. It's a far cry from Massachusetts; as her mother determinedly settles in, California rebelliously changes her name to Lucy and starts saving every penny for the trip back east. Ever willing to lose herself in a book when she should be doing errands, Lucy is an irresistible teenager; her lively narration and stubborn, slightly naive self-confidence (as well as a taste for colorful invective: ``Gol durn, rip-snortin' rumhole and cussed, dad-blamed, dag diggety, thundering pisspot,'' she storms) recall the narrator of Catherine, Called Birdy (1994), without seeming as anachronistic. Other characters are drawn with a broader brush, a shambling platoon of unwashed miners with hearts (and in one case, teeth) of gold. Arvella eventually moves on, but Lucy has not only lost her desire to leave California, but found a vocation as well: town librarian. With a story that is less a period piece than a timeless and richly comic coming-of-age story, Cushman remains on a roll. (Fiction. 10- 13)"

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

PW gave a starred review to this gold-rush novel by Newbery Medalist Cushman, calling it """"a coming-of-age story rich with historical flavor."""" Ages 8-12. (May)

School Library Journal

Gr 5-8--Lucy is no stranger to heartache yet she recounts her New England family's move to a California gold rush town with verve and wit. A rich historical novel. (Aug. 1996)