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- Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Humdrum Peril and Romance
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- Author: Marthe Jocelyn
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: Candlewick Press, Cambridge MA (2004)
- ISBN: 076362120X
- Rating: * * * * Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076362120X/scriquil
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- "Wish: To see the world and have the world see me! [...] I am twitching with excitement, imagining all that awaits us now that we've left our home." And so begins the diary of Mable Riley, a young Canadian girl at the turn of the last century. Her older sister, Viola, is to be the new schoolmistress at Sellerton School in Ontario that fall, and the two girls are boarding at Goodhand Farm, walking distance from the school.
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- Through the words of aspiring writer and dedicated Nellie Bly fan, Mable, we see the girls' daily lives unfolding, as each girl adjusts to the new place, new responsibilities, new people and nostalgia for the home and family they've left behind in Ambler's Corners.
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- Mable, with her adventurous, irresponsible and irrepressible spirit, is always at odds with Viola, whose love for the humdrum, neatness and order, makes her a stickler for correct behavior. Both, however, share a deep love of family and books. While Mable conveys an impression of carelessness, she is, in fact, an intelligent and keen observer of life and an astute judge of people's emotions and the thoughts behind their actions. She displays a wry wit in her detailed notes about her day-to-day interactions with Viola, the Goodhands, her fellow pupils and the eccentric Mrs. Rattle.
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- It is Mrs. Rattle, who has a profound effect on impressionable Mable, hovering on the cusp of adulthood. Mrs. Rattle is a real writer, who wears daring fashions, rides a bicycle, lives alone, undauntingly states her opinions and is a staunch and radical suffragist. In short, Mrs. Rattle has all the peril and romance Mable is craving in her young life. And Mable is swept along on a wave of hero worship that allows her to dig in deep and summon the courage to act on her own beliefs.
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- Despite the precocious maturity of her main character Mable, Marthe Jocelyn has skillfully maintained the narrative in a 14-year-old's voice, while delicately observing, probing and uncovering the entire gamut of adult emotions: from trepidation over a new job to jealousy of a peer's success, from a first love to a death in the family, from infatuation with ideas to fear of acting upon those thoughts to strong determination and pluck in standing by principles.
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- Jocelyn has a masterful command of the English language. Nothing fancy or fanciful. Rather an uncanny knack of placing the right word in the right spot, thereby lending her prose an elegant, endearing quality that, nevertheless, dances on the page with Mable Riley's vitality.
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