Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt

It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:

From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river's shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping...