Abilene knows that it's best to jump off a train before you reach the station, because you should get a look at a town before it gets a look at you. She doesn't know why her daddy Gideon has sent her to Manifest, Kansas, though, or where or why he's going without her in the depth of the Depression, or why things changed so much recently when the cut on her leg got infected and she got so sick. And she doesn't know why no one in Manifest seems to have anything to say about her daddy, since he had plenty of stories to tell about the town when he supposedly lived there nearly 20 years back. And she doesn't know what to make of the box she finds under the floorboards with mysterious letters, fishing lures, corks, and skeleton keys ... or what the Hungarian fortune teller's stories about long-ago Manifest and a couple of boys not named Gideon have to do with her daddy. But she's going to find out ... preferably before her daddy comes back for her ... if he comes ...

Clare Vanderpool won the Newbery Award for Moon Over Manifest, her first novel. Part mystery, part adventure story, large part historical fiction that will teach young readers much more than they will realize about social history of the US during the early part of the 20th century, the story alternates between Manifest in the Depression and during its heyday two decades previously. Abilene is a charming heroine, the characters are vivid, and if some parts of the story (especially the denouement) are a little far-fetched, the eloquence of the writing and the excellence of the sweep of the story more than make up for it.