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One Came Home

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One Came Home
by Amy Timberlake
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.  257 pgs. Fiction

     Thirteen year old Georgie Burkhardt is a crack shot with her Springfield rifle and she speaks her mind plain.  But when she tells her sister's intended that her former boyfriend kissed her, older sister Agatha leaves town with a bunch of pigeoners and doesn't come back, until something that looks like it might be her body--wearing a blue-green dress and with auburn hair--shows up.  Everyone believes these are Agatha's remains except Georgie, and she lights out for Dog Hollow to find her sister. Amy Timberlake's sparkling new novel is a model of frontier fiction for young people with echoes of True Grit and Huckleberry Finn, though Georgie is a complete character (and a complete "character") in her own right. Filled with humor and pathos, based on actual historical events (including the largest nesting of passenger pigeons in history near a small Wisconsin town), One Came Home has everything required for a rip-snortin' read from the best of our pioneer past.
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