ALICE ROSE and SAM
Kathryn Lasky. Hyperion, $14.95 (208p) ISBN
0-7868-0336-3
Reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, February 16 Issue
Unlike most other residents of Virginia City, Nev., in the 1860s, feisty 12-year-old Alice Rose does not give a hoot about silver mining or striking it rich. "This is no place for a child!" she protests, and the grittiness of the opening scenes proves her point: while her father works late at the newspaper, Alice Rose sneaks off to the cemetery to protect her mother's and infant sister's fresh graves from coyotes. She sets about earning enough money to return to Boston and join her cousins at a proper ladies' seminary, but in the meantime she consorts with an eclectic collection of friends: the hurdygurdy girls, for whom she sews dresses; kindly Hop Sing, who lays track for the railroad; rich Miss Eilley; and the not-yet-famous Samuel Clemens, who helps Alice Rose expose the nefarious deeds of a band of Confederate vigilantes called the Society of Seven. Alice Rose's frustrations with the West contrast with Sam's recognition of its beauty ("You look down into the throat of that cactus blossom, Alice Rose, and you tell me if you have ever seen anything prettier"), but both enjoy a good yarn and are suspicious of the town's hypocritical Christians. Lasky's (True North) picturesque dialogue and precise, energetic characterizations more than make up for the book's choppy flow. A view of American history teeming with adventure and local color. Ages8-12. (Mar)
Kirkus Reviews, March 1 1998
A newspaperman’s daughter and novice reporter Sam Clemens uncover a plot to seize the mighty Comstock Lode for the Confederacy in this open-throttle page turner from Lasky (True North, 1996, etc.).
After her mother dies in childbirth Alice Rose’s loneliness is relieved by her father's new employee, Sam, who has startling ideas about God and the Bible, and an imagination as unfettered as his red hair. In exchange for Sam’s treating her as a thinking adult rather than a child, she feeds him story ideas and local anecdotes - then graduates to collaborator when she witnesses a murder tied to an anonymous vigilante group known as the "Society of Seven" in fact, the Society is out to take over the silver mines for the Southern cause, and Alice Row discovers that she's in danger not only for seeing the murder; but for being part owner of a key claim. Lasky surrounds Alice Rose with a wild array of barflies, "hurdy-gurdy girls," nouveau millionaires, immigrant Chines (one, Hop Sing, hails from Carson City), crooked lawyers, and hard-living reporters; she also gives her a salty, vivid way with words - "Mr. Clemens . . this country is about as pretty as a singed cat. more like the Devil's spittoon than the Garden of Eden" - and propels her into plenty of tense situations. Fan’s of Karen Cushman’s "The Ballad of Lucy Whipple" (1996) and Kathleen Karr’s Oh Those Harper Girls (1992) have a plucky new heroine to admire. (Fiction 11-13)