The Girl Who Ran Away (1969) (aka Charley)

Charley
also published as The Girl Who Ran Away
Joan G. Robinson, il. Prudence Seward
1969, Coward-McCann

"I'll run away," said Charley, "that's what I'll do."

Charley, whose real and unused name is Rowan, is a prickly, rambunctious and imaginative girl who likes to draw and hear the story of Lizzie Scrotten.

The story of Lizzie Scrotten was a story of the bad old days, when poor people starved, and people without homes went tramping from workhouse to workhouse.

This beloved story is told and retold, patiently, by the family cook. Charley's favorite part is when Lizzie is alone at night, homeless, and walking along looking longingly into the lighted windows of the cozy homes she's passing. A middle child trapped between a clever older brother and a sickly little brother, Charley dreams of being alone and outcast, set apart.

When she's sent to stay with a favorite aunt, Charley's thrilled - until she reads a note not meant for her eyes, and realizes that aunt Louie hadn't wanted her to come. Betrayed, Charley gets off the train early and sneaks into town instead of going to Louie's house. Finding an old chicken house, Charley seizes on her chance to become Lizzie Scrotten. And for a season, the protected middle-class child becomes a free-spirited child of poverty - albeit a somewhat romantic, Boxcar Childrenesque poverty.

It was dawn when she woke properly. The sky was lightening and the air was full of the twitter of birds. She sprang up and scrambled through the hedge, which was hung with great glistening spiders' webs.

Sleeping in her chicken house and drinking from a garden hose in a nearby yard, Charley keeps a watchful eye on her aunt's house and plays different roles with different people she encounters - a gypsy with a local child, a mute with a shopkeeper, a cripple with a minister - for a variety of reasons both practical and playful. Her most meaningful encounter, though, is with a young man who is also running away, and the conversation they have about it. When a crisis comes, though, Charley discovers that she can't be Lizzie any longer.

A cheerful, interesting read that draws its power from the mundane-turned-fascinating details of Charley's hobo life, and her quick, deep store of tales to spin for the strangers in her aunt's village.

About the author
Most famous for her picture books about Teddy Robinson.

Other books
When Marnie Was There
The Adventures of Uncle Lubin
The Dark House of the Sea Witch
Dear Teddy Robinson
Teddy Robinson Himself
Mary-Mary Stories
Meg and Maxie
The Summer Surprise

Similar Stories
The Boxcar Children Gertrude Chandler Warner 1924
Roller Skates Ruth Sawyer 1936

The Witches' Bridge (aka The Mystery Of The Witches' Bridge)
Barbee Oliver Carleton
1967, Holt, Rinehart And Winston

Out of the night, and the fog, and the marsh, these three, Doom shall come for thee.

Dan Pride is a 13-year-old orphan who's spent the three years since his parents' deaths as a lonely, largely unwanted resident of English boarding schools. Finally, his reclusive Uncle Julian has agreed to take him into the family house near Boston, a property set in salt marshes which has been in the family for generations. Dan is looking forward to being part of a real family again, but his hopes are crushed by Billy Ben, the jolly handyman who tells him of the family curse. Long ago, the town accused Samuel Pride and his wife of witchcraft; they were executed, but not before Samuel laid a curse on the town that even today lingers in the locals' minds. Now, Pride's Point is as isolated mentally as physically, subject to superstitions and suspicions that have embittered his uncle and explain why Dan's own father fled the place for Europe.

Dan, struggling with the loneliness and local hostility, learning who he can trust and what he will believe, finds that family history is both a burden and a link. Desperate to make his distant uncle like him, he determines he'll solve a long-festering mystery at Pride. Years earlier, the curse had struck again when Julian's father had died on a foggy night in the marshes, supposedly on his way back from making peace with their arch-enemies, the Bishop family. The Bishops said he'd never come; the money he'd been carrying was never found. The death had reinvigorated the legend, and turned Julian into an oddity.

He peered through the rain, eager for his first glimpse of the great salt marshes. "What's Pride's Point like?" he asked curiously.

"It's self-sufficient, like the old places, with its own orchard and gardens and such. And it stays the same while the world keeps changing.

The house and holdings of Pride's Point, usually simply called Pride, exert a powerful pull on the story, a sense of place reminiscent of Moorethwaite Manor or Green Knowe. Ancestral homes, the magic of long-standing occupation, the sense of a history shared through the roots of plants and set of stones. It's not a matter of who has the big ancestral house, though; Lamie, the hermit, expresses it most plainly:

My mother made such ointment as this, and her mother before her... They have not gone, you know, theose good people. You see them in the ditches dug in the marsh, and in the cellar holes below... and you see them in the white roses that grow wild now, on all our islands. They brought the roses with them when they came, three hundred years ago and half a world away... They are still here, our first people.

A very well-written book with interesting, believable characters and an engrossing plot.

Other Books
The Wonderful Cat Of Cobbie Bean (1957)
The Secret Of Saturday Cove (1961)
Chester Jones (1963)
Benny And The Bear

The Leveller
Jacqueline Dembar Greene
1984, Walker & Company

In 1779 Massachusetts, a young man named Tom Cook lives alone, regarded uneasily by his neighbors. They can't deny he has helped the poorest among them by his 'levelling' activities of stealing from the rich to give to the needy, but there are rumors about Cook, rumors that won't die. It's said that when he was an infant, his mother sold his soul to the devil in order to save his life from a fever. The story has plagued him his whole life, forcing his family to abandon the community of Westborough and their devil-owned son, and leaving even the most kindly neighbors somewhat in fear of him. It's only when Jesse Baxter, a boy whose family is new to the village, comes to see him that Tom realizes how lonely he's been.

"You don't have to be so alone," Jesse offered. "You could make friends with the farmers you've helped. They trust you."

"No, Jess. I won't be accepted in this town unless I stand before the Meeting and confess that the devil's led me to steal and ask the forgiveness of the Meeting. I'll never do it. I'm serving God in my own way and don't need anyone's blessing."

Tom's stubborn, proud and resentful of the minister who bought his family's former home. He may be the perfect New Englander. But he also has a devilish sense of humor, one that bails him out of various human traps and may, in the end, bail him out of his hellish bargain. For the story is true; Beelzebub has bought Tom Cook's soul and is intent on collecting.

A quick, character-first story that blends the stoic blandness of the New England colonial period with the snappish color of a ghost story. Tom's a convincing character, and his enemies are given some depth. The robin hood aspect of the story is less believable, and rather glossed over, as is Jesse's character.