Good as that book was, Moon over Manifest, the 2011 Newbery winner by Clare Vanderpool, swept me away. The main character, 12-year-old Abilene Tucker, who was a seasoned train rider in the 1930s, got a surprise when her father dropped her off near the town of Manifest, Kansas, telling her he’d come back for her. She arrived in time for the last day of the school and went, trusting she wouldn’t be back in the fall.

In response to the school teacher’s assignment to write a story over the summer, Abbie and her new friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, wove their way around an amazing bunch of quirky townspeople on a quest to find out the identity of someone called the Rattler – presumably a WWI spy and traitor. The story switched between letters from 1918, local newspaper columns from 1918 and 1936 and stories told by an odd Hungarian woman, a local diviner. What an engrossing story – kept me going to the last page!

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