Karen Cushman
3) Matilda Bone
Meggy arrives in London expecting to be welcomed by her father, who sent for her, but he doesn't want her to assist in his laboratory when he sees that not only is she female, she needs two sticks to walk. Sent on trivial errands, she learns to navigate the city, which is earthy and colorful as well as dirty, noisy, and filled with rogues and thieves. Meanwhile she is befriended by the alchemist's former assistant, and when it appears that her
...In 1849 a twelve-year-old girl who calls herself Lucy is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a small California mining town. There Lucy helps run a boarding house and looks for comfort in books while trying to find a way to return "home."
In his thirteenth year, Will Sparrow, liar and thief, becomes a runaway. On the road, he encounters a series of con artists—a pickpocket, a tooth puller, a pig trainer, a conjurer—and learns that others are more adept than he at lying and thieving. Then he reluctantly joins a traveling troupe of "oddities," including a dwarf and a cat-faced girl, holding himself apart from the "monsters" and resolving to be on guard against further
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