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Francie is happiest up on her hill, bare feet pushed into the cool grass, eating a Scooter Pie, reading a Nancy Drew mystery, and--best of all--waving at "her" train as it heads up the tracks to Birmingham. Life isn't easy being a quiet, bright, "colored" eighth-grader growing up in the '30s in Noble, Alabama. The fact that Francie can be a little willful doesn't always help. Her train promises escape, the chance to travel to "places of possibility." And anywhere seems better than Noble, with its "pickaninny" racism and back-breaking routine, where she slaves away with her mother cooking and cleaning for white folks in town (when she isn't studying hard at Booker T. Washington, her clapboard country school, that is). Francie dreams of Chicago, where her father moved a year ago to work as a Pullman porter, promising to send for Francie, her little brother Prez, and their mama as soon as he could. But Daddy has yet to come through, and Noble begins to offer possibilities of its own, the most exciting being when Francie puts her reading smarts to use tutoring an unschooled 16-year-old from nearby New Carlton. When he gets framed for attacking a white foreman, though, the courageous Francie can't keep from trying to help, endangering herself and those she holds dear. A convincing, transporting tale from Karen English, author of such lovely picture books as Just Right Stew. (Ages 9 to 12) --Paul Hughes
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