Teenagers are perfect protagonists for historical novels. Two historical novels for adults that really impressed me recently, 'The Children's Book' and 'Wolf Hall,' feature adolescents as central characters.

The rite of passage from child to adult is universal. And as Hattie shows in Kirby Larson's touching story, young adults' ability to bridge the divide between world of the kids and the world of the grown-ups allows the reader to enter both.

The time is 1918, just after America's entry into the Great War.
Hattie is a sixteen-year-old orphan who finds a way to escape her stodgy, straight-laced and reluctant caretaker, Aunt Ivy. When her long unseen uncle dies and wills her his Montana homestead claim, Hattie jumps at the chance to get out of Arlington, Iowa. To own the land, she must find the wherewithal to 'prove up' the claim in ten months.

That's enough for an interesting tale, but Larson adds a subplot that spices things up considerably. It was a time when patriotism sometime became an excuse for bigotry to exercise power. German-Americans were treated shabbily, in 'Hattie Big Sky' to the point of persecution.

It's to Larson's credit that she doesn't present the issue in black and white. Indeed, Hattie, who forms close bonds with a German farmer and his family, is attracted to the dashing young Traft Martin, land baron and leader of the County Council of Defense. It would be easy to paint Traft as a coward for avoiding the draft and a hate-filled monomaniac for harrassing German-Americans, but he's more complicated than that.

In fact, I found him the most fascinating character in the novel next to Hattie, and spent some time visualizing who might play this equivocal villain in the movie.

The book is peopled with quite a cast, and offers a nice window into the time of Woodrow Wilson and the Spanish Flu pandemic, as seen from the wide open spaces of the Montana prairie.