Central Kansas Library System

At 13, Nellie Bishop fights her parents' plan to marry her off for money to the highest bidder among the workmen in their Pennsylvania canal town. This fine historical novel, set in the 1880s, dramatizes the hardship among the laboring Irish at the time and shows a young girl trapped in a family brutalized by poverty. Nellie's mother takes in washing; her father drinks and gambles away the little they have; Nellie tries to protect her younger brother,...