Chasing Secrets - Softcover

Choldenko, Gennifer

 
9780385742542: Chasing Secrets
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385742541 ISBN 13: 9780385742542
Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Newbery Honor–winning author Gennifer Choldenko deftly combines humor, tragedy, fascinating historical detail, and a medical mystery in this exuberant new novel.

San Francisco, 1900. The Gilded Age. A fantastic time to be alive for lots of people . . . but not thirteen-year-old Lizzie Kennedy, stuck at Miss Barstow’s snobby school for girls. Lizzie’s secret passion is science, an unsuitable subject for finishing-school girls. Lizzie lives to go on house calls with her physician father. On those visits to his patients, she discovers a hidden dark side of the city—a side that’s full of secrets, rats, and rumors of the plague.

The newspapers, her powerful uncle, and her beloved papa all deny that the plague has reached San Francisco. So why is the heart of the city under quarantine? Why are angry mobs trying to burn Chinatown to the ground? Why is Noah, the Chinese cook’s son, suddenly making Lizzie question everything she has known to be true? Ignoring the rules of race and class, Lizzie and Noah must put the pieces together in a heart-stopping race to save the people they love.


Winner of a Los Angeles Public Library FOCAL (Friends of Children and Literature) Award
Nominated for:
Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards
Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award (Middle School division)
Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL) Readers Award
California Library Association’s Beatty Award, Eureka List

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gennifer Choldenko is the New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor–winning author of many popular children’s books, including Notes from a Liar and Her Dog, If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Al Capone Shines My Shoes, Al Capone Does My Homework, and No Passengers Beyond This Point. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she hopes never to see a rat. Dead or otherwise. Visit her online at choldenko.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1
The Cook, the Maid, Our Horse, and Papa
I find a spot on the bench in front of the line of carriages, buggies, and one stalled motorcar facing the wrong direction, trying my best to ignore the other girls’ whispered plans as they climb into each other’s buggies after school. They’re going to wear split skirts and bicycle in Golden Gate Park, or carry parasols and wear hats and gloves to shop at the Emporium, or go to each other’s houses to try on new cotillion dresses. I crack open my book as more girls sweep by. A book is a friend you take with you wherever you go.
Gemma leans on her crutches next to the bench, resting her black-stockinged toe on the ground. Her sprained ankle is bandaged in a crisscross pattern--very different from the way my father does it. Gemma has blue eyes, reddish-blond hair, and full cheeks that always look feverish. “What are you reading about?”
“Mucus,” I tell her. “Did you know your nose produces a flask full of mucus every day?”
Gemma makes a face. “A flask full . . . Don’t tell me you drink it?”
“Actually, I do. Everyone does.” I know I shouldn’t say things like this. Aunt Hortense says I try hard to be peculiar. But she’s wrong; I come by it quite naturally.
“Did Spencer ask you yet?” Hattie with the pouty lips calls to Gemma.
Gemma turns to answer. I don’t hear what she says. It isn’t intended for me. Nothing they say ever is.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a friend my age. I should be used to it by now. I was eleven when Aunt Hortense insisted I enroll in Miss Barstow’s School for Young Women, where every girl learns the virtues of patience, the proper use of calling cards, and how to marry a man of stature, which means he has money. Last year, Clara, my friend from church, moved away, and my big brother, Billy, turned mean and stopped letting me tag along with him.
Now I’m thirteen, and my friends are the cook, the maid, our horse, and my father. Luckily, tomorrow I get to go on calls with Papa, so I won’t have to face Miss Barstow’s for three whole days. I’ve been assisting my father for only a few months, but I’ve taken to it like butter to biscuits.
What Papa does is a lot more interesting than what we learn in school. There’s no science at Miss Barstow’s. No math after third grade. We take subjects deemed necessary for cultured young women destined to run a household of servants--French, elocution, dancing, music, geography, etiquette, and entertaining.
I like geography the best, then French and elocution. Etiquette and entertaining put me to sleep, and dancing is pure agony.
When I look up again, Jing is here in our black buggy with our filly, Juliet, who’s snorting and prancing like she hasn’t been out in a while.
Jing waggles his eyebrows at me, and I climb up beside him.
He flaps the reins, and Juliet trots forward into the street. Bits of foam fly where the lines rub against her shiny brown neck.
Jing doesn’t have a long braid or wear baggy pants and white socks the way most Chinamen do. He dresses like my father and speaks formally, never in pidgin English. We say he’s our cook, but he also takes care of our garden, our two horses, our nine chickens, and our cat, Orange Tom. But not the parrot, Mr. P. Our maid, Maggy Doyle, looks after Mr. P. Maggy does the work of three maids, but she has peculiar ways. “Addled,” Billy calls her.
We take the route by the sign that says PAINLESS PIANO-PLAYING DENTIST. Painless, my foot. Papa says he plays the piano so no one can hear his patients scream.
Jing smiles slyly. “See anything in my ear?”
I lean in. “No.”
He turns his head. “How about the other one?”
I peer in that ear. “Nope.”
“Ahhh . . . what’s this?” He pretends to pull a tiny frog out of his right ear and hands it to me.
I grin at him, inspecting the live frog in my hand. It’s bright green with a black mask.
Jing always has something for me. A smooth black stone, a white feather or cookies baked in the shape of my initials. I keep his gifts on my windowsill, except for the ones I eat.
He asks me how Miss Barstow’s was today, and I try to think of a story that will make him laugh.
“Miss Barstow bought a new dunce cap. She tried it on to demonstrate what will happen if you flunk your French vocabulary test, but her hairpin got caught and she couldn’t get it off. Miss Annabelle had to help her.”
“Stuck dumb,” Jing says.
“Dumbstuck,” I say, and laugh. “It serves her right. I hate that thing. Not that I’ve ever had to wear it, but still.”
We pass a workhorse pulling a big dray. On the corner, white-ribboned temperance ladies pass out flyers, and newsboys hawk papers.
“Orange Tom has disappeared again. I have a hunch he has a lady friend,” Jing says.
The frog hops in my lap. I cup my hand over him to prevent escape. “I hope his lady friend likes rats.”
Orange Tom loves to hunt, but he kills more than he can eat. He’s fond of leaving dead rodents in Aunt Hortense’s fountain, in the backseat of Uncle Karl’s brand-new automachine, on our front step, and on top of Papa’s medical journals.
The farther we get from Miss Barstow’s, the more my mood improves. I settle back and enjoy the short ride up the hill to home.
Aunt Hortense and Uncle Karl’s house on Nob Hill is enormous--five times the size of ours--and built to look like a palace in Paris. Crystal chandeliers, paintings of angels, marble busts of famous old men, gold candelabras held up by gold cupids with gold twigs in their gold hands. Every night it’s lit with all electric light.
Aunt Hortense and Uncle Karl own our house, which is tiny compared to theirs but plenty large enough for Papa, Billy, and me. Aunt Hortense married sugar money. Her sister, Lucy, my mother, married a doctor who will care for patients whether they can pay or not.
My mother died five years ago. It started with a stomachache; Papa thought she had parasites, but it was cancer. No cure for that. Maybe I will discover one.
When my father is away on calls, Aunt Hortense steps in to oversee Maggy, Jing, Billy, and me. I’ve tried to convince Papa that now that Billy is sixteen, he should be in charge. Billy is bad-tempered, but I still prefer him to Aunt Hortense. I haven’t been able to persuade Papa yet.
Aunt Hortense never lets up--I’m not to come or go without her permission. I guess it’s because she can’t have children of her own that she thinks she owns us.
I watch her walk down the steps from her house, wearing a yellow dress that sounds like a bristle brush when she walks. She has on white lace-up boots and carries a pearl-handled parasol. Most of her clothes come from Paris. A few weeks a year, French dresses are brought to the Fairmont Hotel for ladies to purchase.
Jing reins in Juliet so I can climb out. I like it better when I get to help unharness her, but I can’t do that with Aunt Hortense standing here.
I still have the frog in my hand, and contemplate handing it to her. How she’d jump! Aunt Hortense is terrified of amphibians and reptiles. She’s allergic to cats and doesn’t like dogs.
She peers at me. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Elizabeth. What did you do to your hair?”
“Trimmed it, ma’am.”
“With a meat cleaver? They have better hairstyles at the almshouse.”
“Really? Well, I’ll sign myself up,” I say under my breath.
“I heard that,” Aunt Hortense snaps....

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Verlag
Random House Children's Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385742541
ISBN 13 
9780385742542
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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