Skip to main content

Will Sparrow's Road

By
Will Sparrow's Road
by Karen Cushman
Clarion, 2012. 216 pgs. Historical Fiction.

     Unlike Ms. Cushman's Newbery and Newbery Honor winning books, her latest features a boy in the title role. Will Sparrow has been sold into servitude by his father in exchange for ale from the local tavern keeper.  Will, an acknowledged liar and thief, steals one too many meat pies from his boss, and the man decides to sell him for a chimney sweep in London. Will runs away, knowing that, as a rule, sweeps live short, unhappy lives before dying of black lung. With no money, nothing to eat, and no one to care for him, Will takes to the road where he is occasionally helped along by kind-hearted folk but more often taken advantage of by con artists and tricksters. Will decides to care for "no one but myself, and nothing but my belly," but fortunately falls in with some itinerant Fair folk who travel from place to place exhibiting "oddities and prodigies" for the few pennies given them by curiosity seekers.  At first Will Sparrow's Road seems like not much more than an interesting catalogue of Elizabethan life, but by and by Will comes to care very much for some of his companions, and when he has to choose between running away from a terrible punishment, or returning to stand by his friends, he chooses the right road.  The audiobook of this title is particularly well done, read by Katherine Kellgren. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The New Girl

By
The New Girl By Cassandra Calin New York: Graphix, 2024. Comic. 261 pages. 12-year-old Lia and her family have just moved from Romania to Montreal, and she's doing her best to keep up with the changes. But, she's homesick. She misses the rest of her family, her friends, and her favorite Romanian treats. She doesn't speak French and her English is shaky, which makes it hard to make friends, even in her international immersion class. And she's dealing with super painful menstrual cramps every month. But before long, Lia starts to hit her stride. She befriends the other bilingual girls in her class, she gets a spot as the artist for her school's magazine, and even has a new crush -- Julien. Though she may be the new girl, Lia is starting to fit in. This slice of life graphic novel is an adorable choice for middle grade readers and young teens. Lia is a likable protagonist and readers will have little difficulty relating to her adjustment to school. The text speaks to a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker

By
  Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker By Heidi Heilig New York: Greenwillow Books, 2025. Fiction. 291 pages. Thanks to Cincinnati Lee's no good, dirty rotten, artifact stealing great great great grandfather, Cincinnati's family is now cursed and Cincinnati feels like it's up to her to break the curse. Which involves trying to steal the artifacts back from museums that her grandfather robbed from graves and archeological sites around the world and return them to their countries of origin. But when Cincinnati's first artifact stealing mission goes awry, she decides it might be more effective to steal an all-powerful artifact herself that she can use to break the curse - The Spear of Destiny. Unfortunately her race for the spear will pit her against art smugglers and thieves intent on finding the ancient artifact themselves. If you are looking for an Indiana Jones read-alike, this is the perfect for you! Heavy on the adventure with similar levels of mysticism to those seen in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more