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Better Together
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*Starred Review* Ten-year-old Billy's story begins in a Dickensian orphanage, where being pawned off to a local glass factory is one of the few routes out. Billy looks forward to working, until his pal runs away after being disfigured at the factory and discloses its real conditions. Billy is saved from the same fate by the appearance of a long-lost uncle, who takes him to a West Virginia coal mining town; soon the lad is going down in the mines himself. Then a mine caves in, and Billy's involvement with the union forces him to leave town--and join the circus. All of this might have become simply a string of eye-raising events if it wasn't for Porter's shrewd choice to frame this as a picaresque journey, similar in style, and in some ways substance, to that taken by Huck Finn. Porter's writing is strong, and the story, told in Billy's steadfast yet child-true voice, makes the shocking history about the lives of children at the turn of the last century come alive for today's readers. But this is no polemic; Billy's personal relationships, and his sensitivity to both the living and the dead, make this child very real as he searches for home. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
Folks say I'm bound to be unlucky in life, for I was born at midnight on a Friday, the thirteenth of December, and Peggy says it's certain I can commune with spirits. But I ain't never seen any ghosts, not even my own mother, and wouldn't that be the ghost I'd see if I could?
So begins the tale of Billy Creekmore, a boy with mystifying powers and the glorious gift of storytelling. But what does life hold for someone growing up in the cruel clutches of the Guardian Angels Home for Boys, where Billy's gifts do more harm than good?
Escaping the orphanage seems an impossible feat, but when a stranger comes to claim Billy, he sets off on an extraordinary journey. With only a tin box that holds precious mementos of his beloved mother and mysterious father, Billy travels from the coal mines of West Virginia to the spectacular world of a traveling circus in search of his past, his future, and his own true self.
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