By Esther Wood Brady
A timid ten-year-old has to carry a secret Patriot message, baked inside a loaf of bread, across British-held New York on her own.
Ellen Toliver is ten and scared of nearly everything. Her grandfather carries messages for the Patriots, and when he's hurt and can't make a delivery, the message still has to go — it's hidden inside a loaf of bread. So Ellen gets dressed as a boy and sent out across New York, which the British hold, to get the loaf over the river to Elizabeth-town. It goes wrong almost right away. A gang of boys shoves her around, she winds up on the wrong boat with a rough boatman, gets carried miles off course, and has to walk. She loses the bread. She gets it back. She keeps going. It's a short, tight, tense book, and Ellen stays scared the whole way through and keeps going anyway.
If your child pictures brave people as the ones who were never scared in the first place, this is a good corrective. Ellen isn't plucky. She's timid at the start, timid in the middle, and frightened at the end, and she does the thing anyway, which is more useful to watch than a hero who never feels fear. It's also just a really good plain adventure: one day going wrong in every direction, short chapters, a single clear problem, easy to keep turning pages. It's fifty years old and still moves fast, and it's a rare fit for a child who wants a real novel but not a long one.