*The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg

*The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg.  Clarion, 2011, 241 pages with author note.

Reading Level: Young Adult, ages 12-15

Recommended for: Ages 12-14 and up

Bottom Line: This mother-daughter adventure, based on a true story, is a vivid picture of a relationship “forged in adversity” as the two attempt to walk across America in 1896.

Clara Estby, age 18, is not expecting much from life, especially after she has to cut short her high school career in Spokane to help out on the farm in Mica Creek, Washington.  The year is 1896 and the country is deep in depression–so is Clara’s mother, after losing 12-year-old Henry to infantile arthritis.  Helga Estby hasn’t been out of bed for three months.  But then, in classic bipolar mode, she hops up and decides to save the farm from foreclosure.  She makes a bet with a New York City publisher to walk across America in eight months, for a prize of $10,000.  Papa can’t talk her out of it but persuades Clara, as the level-headed one, to go along.  On May 7 the two women set out on a roughly 3000-mile journey east.

They nearly freeze in a blizzard and drown in a flash flood, tangle with surly homesteaders and sinister highwaymen, have tea with President-elect McKinnley and his wife, contend with snakes, mosquitoes, and each other.  Mama is subject to moods, a craver of the limelight who often says more than she should; a big dreamer, high soarer, and hard crasher: “I have no patience with people who accept whatever life gives them without a fight . . . ‘God’s will,’ they say.  Well, I say, With God, all things are possible.”   Clara is practical: I know the difference between fantasies and real life.  In fantasies, your heart thrilled to feel the ground shake at the thunder of a hundred wild horses.  In real life, your heart, lungs, and everything else got mashed as a hundred stampeding horses spooked and trampled you.  But on the route she discovers an inner toughness and a taste for journalism. Also a journalist: the enthusiastic and boyish Charles Dore (pronounced in the French manner).  Is there a future with Charles, or is Clara’s future with handsome-and-boring Erick Iverson back home?

The author’s great-aunt and great-grandmother really took this journey.  The details of the bet are unknown, and the bet itself might have been a product of Helga’s active imagination.  But besides an adventurous tale, it’s an excellent portrait of a mother-daughter relationship: frustrating, maddening, and ultimately rewarding, in spite of one shocker of a surprise for Clara.  Rewarding for the reader, too.

Cautions: none

Overall rating: 4.5 (out of 5)

• Worldview/moral value: 4
• Artistic value: 5

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