Hitch [Hardcover]

Jeanette Ingold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

As a teenager growing up during the Depression, Moss Trawnley doesn't have time to be a kid. In search of opportunity, Moss lies about his age and heads west to join Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. While working to protect Montana's wildlife, he goes to school, makes lifelong friends, falls in love, and finds what he almost lost in the crisis of the Great Depression: himself.

In this captivating work of fiction, Jeanette Ingold tells the story of a teen who risks everything to start a new life and, in the process, gains a future.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 7 Up–Despite the Great Depression, 17-year-old Moss Trawnley, introduced in Airfield (Harcourt, 1999), thinks he has it made–a decent job, a girlfriend, and admittance into radio school with almost enough money saved to pay for it come fall. He is even able to help his mother support his younger siblings. All this changes when he is fired in order to give the job to a man with a family who is related to the boss. Moss leaves Texas by hitching a ride on a freight train. Trying to locate his father, he finds him in Montana–drunk, jobless, and homeless. He himself is picked up for vagrancy. With neither job prospects nor money and to avoid another arrest, he joins the Civilian Conservation Corps. The work is hard, but it provides a place to live, food, and money to send home. Hitch is essentially a coming-of-age story. Moss, who from the beginning has shown a sense of responsibility, must now make adult decisions about how to react to adversity and discord within the CCC as he assumes a leadership role, albeit reluctantly. His growth from an impulsive teen into a thoughtful young man is told in a compelling manner. Plot and description transport readers into another time and place with accuracy and interest as Moss's true character is revealed. A good read from a masterful storyteller.–Janet Hilbun, Texas Woman's University, Denton, TX
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Gr. 8-11. Ingold does something quite interesting here. She takes a topic, the Civilian Conservation Corps, that few teens have heard of and even fewer are interested in and works a credible, involving story around it. Moreover, both her writing style and her 1930s setting feels totally true to the time. Often teens in historical novels seem like today's youth, merely plunked down in a different era. That's not true of protagonist Moss Trulawany, who seems utterly of his time. After being laid off from his job at an airstrip, Moss sets out to find his father, who is supposed to be working to help his family. But Mr. Trulawany is really an unemployed drunk, so it's up to Moss to find work. Through a string of fortunate events in which some people care enough to help him, Moss finds a job in Montana with the CCC, where, to his surprise, his leadership qualities surface. Some of the characters and situations are stock (as they might have been in 1930s books or movies), but the good versus bad simplicity of many of the incidents works in context. The story is often moving as Moss, through the CCC, changes lives, especially his own. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books; 1 edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0152047476
• ISBN-13: 978-0152047474
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,006,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Growing up, I liked cameras, my violin, reading, traveling, and running games. I flirted with becoming an actor (briefly, early, before playing a shadow, a flower, and a penguin). I didn't think about writing until I landed in a newsroom, assigned to obituaries, but it's been a straight line since.
I put a modern newsroom in my new novel, PAPER DAUGHTER. I hope you'll enjoy it and my other books for young adults. They include HITCH, a Christopher Award winner, and THE BIG BURN, historical fiction that VOYA called, "A must-read for adrenalin junkies."
Please visit me at www.jeanetteingold.com.

JEANETTE INGOLD's popular fiction for teens and middle school readers includes THE WINDOW, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and International Reading Association Young Adults' Choice; PICTURES, 1918, a Texas Lone Star Reading List book; AIRFIELD, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age; MOUNTAIN SOLO, a Missouri Mark Twain Award nominee and Texas TAYSHAS book; THE BIG BURN, a Montana Book Award Honor Book and winner of a Western Writers of America Spur Award for Juvenile Fiction; HITCH, a Society of School Librarians International Best Book; and PAPER DAUGHTER, recipient of an Oppenheimer Gold Seal.
Her short stories include "Moving On," in TIME CAPSUE: SHORT STORIES ABOUT TEENAGERS THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, edited by Donald R. Gallo; and "Word Drift," in XANADU 3, edited by Jane Yolen.
She lives and writes in Montana.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GReat, June 2, 2005

By 

N. Lasky "LASKY" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hitch (Hardcover)

hEllo, im 13 and i read this in like 2 days it was very good i usually dont get hoooked on books that fast! It had parts where it was impossible to put the book down! If u want to buy a book for your boy to inspire him to do something maby get a job this is a good one!

4.0 out of 5 stars Question #5: Do the times shape the individual or vice versa?, December 20, 2006

By 

Hates Dickens - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitch (Hardcover)

Hitch is the story about a seventeen year-old boy named Moss who is living in the Great Depression. After he is fired from his job, he goes off in search for a new one so he can provide for his family. He finds work at Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and it changes his life. At the training camp, he quickly makes some new friends, but some enemies too, including a man named Compton, who is one of the camp's junior leaders. Soon after he gets there, he almost gets kicked out for fighting with two boys who were hassling his friends. However, he is allowed to stay with a warning and is chosen to go with a group to try and set up a new CCC camp and restore the land in Montana, which is where Moss' friend Nate lives. The boys manage to get the camp built in time and, in the process, Moss is appointed a junior leader. After the new boys come in, they start on one of their first conservation projects in Montana, building a dam. However, a new captain takes over the camp, who works the boys too hard and doesn't care about the quality of what they're doing, only pleasing the inspectors. When Moss finds out that he is buying cheap supplies, the captain takes away his junior leader position. As a result, the rest of the boys in the CCC go on strike. Soon afterwards they discover that the cement they had used in the dam they built was also cheap, and the water in the dam was going to flood Nate's family's farm. At first the CCC boys refuse to help, but after Moss' convincing, they put up sandbags and dig an alternate route for the water, and manage to save the plants. Moss decides to stay another term at the CCC, even though some of his friends aren't, and everyone is happy in the end.
After reading this book, I have decided that the times mostly shape the individual, but cannot be used as an excuse for how people act. The characters in this book had to learn to work extra hard for money because of the Great Depression. Today, most boys Moss' age wouldn't be so pressed for money as they were then. Also, people today have become more lazy as a result of all of the new technology and conveniences. In Moss' eyes, the Depression brought out the worst in people. He says: "The endless blasted, blasted Depression. All it did was make people be less than you expected, until it took them away from you altogether" (Ingold, 236). Moss blames the bad changes in people on the Depression, which probably does have a negative impact on some people, but it is their choice how to act. In conclusion, though times do shape people, they shouldn't let themselves be brought down because of them.

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful YA book!, August 7, 2006

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitch (Hardcover)

Seventeen-year-old Moss Trawnley has a big job on his hands. The Great Depression is ravaging America. His Ma is depending on him to help support the family. His Pa has been missing for years. When he's let go from his job in Texas, Moss decides it's time to head out after his Pa, who used to run their farm before the Depression cost their family everything. What Moss finds is a drunk and the truth that his real job is to become a man he can respect, against the odds.

A judge points Moss in the direction of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Moss jumps at the chance for a steady paycheck and somewhere to eat, sleep, and work for six months. What he doesn't foresee are the friends he'll make along the way or the man he will become.

A proud and honest main character and several side characters with appealing nicknames like Apple, Romeo, and The Senator, are just part of the strength of Ingold's Hitch. Filled with images of the dry promise of Montana, boys struggling to be men in a time when men were being broken by misfortune, and the deeds that make boys brothers, Ingold's Hitch is a digestible historical book for the teenage reader.

Ingold's attention to historical details and her use of historical dialect to relay Moss's story, help the book move along while also teaching the reader about a period that defined the American work ethic. Hitch will especially strike a chord for underprivileged teens; but for all teens, the way Moss takes responsibility and builds himself and a part of Monroe, Montana into a new promise will inspire.

Perfect for classroom reading material or as an exploration into a chapter in American history, Hitch will lead readers on a journey of discovery, obstacles, triumphs, and new beginnings.

Armchair Interview says: Worthy of any young adult reader's time.