Cousins In The Castle

From School Library Journal Grade 4-6?Amelia Fairwick, 11, is a motherless child of comfortable means living in Victorian London. When her father purportedly dies on a business trip, she must go to America to live with her closest relatives, distant cousins in New York. The journey is Amelia's first introduction to Cousin Charlotte, a cold, strict chaperone who has come to collect her. The shipboard passage is brightened, however, by Amelia's acquaintance with sprightly Primrose, an orphaned singer in the employ of two grasping rogues slated to perform their musical comedy routine in New York. When the ship arrives, Amelia is abandoned on the pier by Charlotte and winds up in the care of Mrs. Dobbins, a kindly woman who offers her shelter in her tiny basement flat. But the next morning, Mrs. Dobbins is gone, and Amelia discovers that she is a prisoner. Suspicions mount that her cousins are after her fortune as Amelia escapes, searches out her pal Primrose (who is revealed to be a boy named Rosie), and eventually arrives at the forbidding mansion of her dastardly relations. Loose ends are neatly tied up in a run of high-rolling Dickensian coincidences: her father reappears, alive and well, and Rosie discovers that Charlotte, who is not so bad after all, is actually his long-lost mother. This gothic mystery is slight, but it will keep young readers guessing.?Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VTCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From