Tenmile

In an emotionally restrained accounting, Dallas (The Quilt Walk) details late 19th-century mining town hardships as a 13-year-old girl pursues her seemingly impossible dream of graduating from college. In 1880, “life is hard on the Tenmile,” a Colorado mountain range where Sissy Carlson helps her father doctor the residents of their “smoky, noisy mining town.” Sissy and friend Jack Burke plan to attend college, but when Jack drops out of school to help his struggling family, and suffers a potentially fatal mining accident, Sissy fears her own ambitions will similarly crumble, especially in a place where “girls don’t go to college. They just get married.” Clinging to hope for her future and Jack’s recovery, Sissy takes a job tutoring the wealthy mine owner’s son, and tries to reconcile staggering wealth inequality and classism with universally human burdens. Painting a broad portrait of the town and its residents, Dallas’s matter-of-fact third-person narration tells rather than shows, dampening the book’s emotional thrust, though internal dialogue advances Sissy’s character arc and pointed conversations endorse empathy and social justice as the novel’s core message. Characters are presumed white. Ages 9–up. (Nov.)