Synchronized Books

Eleven books reserved books awaited me at the library yesterday! Requested apart from each other, two are amazingly similar in content. Henry Cole's UNSPOKEN is a wordless book about the Underground Railroad? A young girl, while gathering root vegetables from storage shelves, senses a presence in the cornstalks. The single eye she glimpses frightens here, but she thinks back to the soldiers who passed by the farm earlier and takes a corncake - and later other food items - out to the stranger. The slave hunters who come offering a reward eventually pass by her home, and that evening, a cornhusk doll is waiting for her in the barn.

In Tracy Chevalier's latest book entitled THE LAST RUNAWAY, Honor Bright travels to the United States from England in 1850 with her older sister. She senses the presence of another being as she travels by wagon in Ohio and later while staying with Belle Mills, the milliner in the town of Wellington. True to her faith, Honor cannot tell a lie, and Belle wisely advises her not to ask about the person hidden in the shed. As she moves to Faithwell to live among other Quaker Friends, she begins to wonder about the reasons for her move to this strange place...and also what it means to be a friend to others.

I heartily recommend both books!