True Colors
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
Natalie Kinsey-Warnock's beautifully told, warm hearted novel tells the story of one girl's journey to find the mother she never had, set against the period backdrop of a small farming town in 1950s Vermont. For her entire life, 10-year-old Blue has never known her mother. On a cold, wintry day in December of 1941, she was found wrapped in a quilt, stuffed in a kettle near the home of Hannah Spooner, an older townswoman known for her generosity and caring. Life with Hannah so far has been simple—mornings spent milking cows, afternoons spent gardening and plowing the fields on their farm. But Blue finds it hard not to daydream about her mother, and over the course of one summer, she resolves to finally find out who she is. That means searching through the back issues of the local newspaper, questioning the local townspeople, and searching for clues wherever she can find them. Her search leads her down a road of self-discovery that will change her life forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, a two-day-old newborn was left in a flowerpot outside a widow's Vermont farm. Hannah Spooner named the baby for the color of her skin blue at that moment and raised her as her own. Ten years later, Blue narrates the myriad ways in which life disappoints her: endless chores, nagging questions about her parentage, and a loneliness so persistent she tells her troubles to an indifferent stray cat. Friends are so scarce that Blue looks forward to the return every summer of Nadine, a bratty city girl who treats Blue shabbily. The plot is wildly unbalanced: it takes a third of the novel to move beyond the workaday details of farm life; a rush of events overwhelms the last few chapters. Still, Kinsey-Warnock's (Gifts from the Sea) story has its charms, and Blue's eventual realization that it's less important to know who abandoned her than it is to appreciate the woman who rescued her closes the narration on a loving note. A quiet country story for fans of Ruth White's books. Ages 8 12.