By Marsha Amstel
The sixteen-year-old girl who is said to have ridden forty miles through the night to raise the militia, told as a straight adventure.
April 1777. A rider comes pounding up to the Ludington farm in Putnam County with news that the British are burning Danbury, and Colonel Ludington needs his militia and can't go himself. So his eldest, sixteen-year-old Sybil, takes a horse and goes. She rides all night, in rain, in the dark, banging on farmhouse doors with a stick, forty miles, more than twice as far as Paul Revere went. She meets a highwayman on the road and drives him off. By dawn she's soaked through and the militia is mustering. Short chapters, big type, warm illustrations on every spread; it's built for a child who's just starting to read alone.
This is the most accessible book on the shelf by a distance, and that's exactly its use: it's the one you can hand to the child who is still building stamina while everyone else takes a novel, and they get a real Revolution story with a girl at the center of it, not a consolation prize. Big type, forty-eight pages, a picture on every spread, and a night ride that moves. It also fills a gap the rest of the unit leaves: it's the one place a child meets a girl doing something decisive in the war rather than waiting at home.