I should perhaps be focusing on Coats’s newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it’s just come out and well, I haven’t read it yet. But I really want to, based on how much my daughter and I enjoyed Coats’s earlier novel, The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming. I can’t say enough about this book, which is based on the real history of the Mercer Girls, who in the 1860s sailed from the East Coast around the horn to a bustling logging town on Puget Sound. The fictional Jane Deming is an eleven-year-old girl living with her young stepmother and little brother, all of whom are grappling with the Civil War death of the family patriarch. Eager to seek opportunity elsewhere, they head west with stars in their eyes. Initially disillusioned by the muddy streets and rough manners of frontier Seattle, Jane’s self-reliance comes to the fore and she eventually falls in love with her new home. Many Reflections more than withstands comparison with the classic Little House on the Prairie, and the local setting—at one point Jane commutes to school by canoe across Lake Washington—makes it even more special. (ages 8 to 14)
—James Crossley, Madison Books, Seattle, WA
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