Katie's Dream

January 1, 2005
Kelly sets this domestic drama in the farm country of downstate Illinois during the Depression. A virtuous family, Samuel and Julia Wortham and their children, are struggling to feed themselves. Their lives are complicated when Samuel's brother, Edward, shows up with a little girl named Kelly, whom he claims is Samuel's illegitimate daughter. The reader doesn't believe this for a moment, and Edward is portrayed as a snake just out of the penitentiary. But Kelly brings a real family to life and evokes the era--the one-room schoolhouses, the hand-me-down clothes, the reliance on garden vegetables and hunting for food--with great authority. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)