Tomorrow, the River Book

With a long list of her mother’s dos and don’ts swirling in her head, and with a ticket that will get her only halfway home at the end of summer, fourteen-year-old Megan Barnett boards the eastbound train. Her destination, the Mississippi River at Burlington, Iowa, is twenty-four hours and a host of unfamiliar seatmates away. The most pleasant of these characters is Horace, an engineering student whose passion for newspapers, combined with a sharp curve of the tracks, land him nearly in Megan’s lap.

The parade of interesting strangers—some of whom aren’t what they seem— doesn’t end with Megan’s arrival in Burlington, where she joins her sister’s family on the riverboat, the Oh My. River travel, as Megan quickly learns, is fraught with danger, both on the water and off. A keen eye, for seeing beneath the surface of things, can make all the difference.

Leaving a trail of discarded rules and newspaper headlines in her wake, Megan takes on the river and reaps its rewards.

KLIATT

Fourteen-year-old Megan climbs aboard an eastbound train leaving Nebraska and heads for an adventure on the Mississippi River. She is going to join her sister Hannah, her sister's husband Isaac, and their son on the small riverboat, the Oh My. Hannah and Isaac make a modest living delivering goods along the northern part of the river, through Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois, before wintering in New Orleans. The year is 1896 and Megan meets dreamy young men and big-time hustlers on the train journey and on the voyage of the Oh My. Once Megan joins her sister, she learns Isaac has seriously injured his leg in an accident. Without much of a lesson on the differences between the prairie and the river, Megan finds herself not only taking care of her young nephew, but also piloting the boat. When the family needs some financial support while docked for an extended period of time, she goes to work cleaning clamshells to be sold to the button factories. The chapters are introduced by newspaper clippings, which provide additional details that the first-person narrator couldn't know. This is a sweet adventure story with an innocent, hard-working protagonist who helps her older sister in this time of crisis. Readers will appreciate Megan's determination and her willingness to do what is right.