Chasing Secrets

With brisk pacing and unwavering intensity, Karissa Vacker sweeps listeners into 1900s San Francisco as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Lizzie Kennedy, a doctor's daughter and aspiring scientist, seeks to find the true source of the illness. Through her search, she learns that the city is rife with harsh inequalities and twisted political motivations. Vacker's portrayal of Lizzie evokes the best and worst of adolescence--burgeoning curiosity and confidence mixed with determination to comprehend rapidly changing surroundings. Choldenko's characters constantly struggle against each other and societal pressures, and Vacker captures these dualities with compassion. Choldenko finishes the piece by narrating her fact-based author's note on the real San Francisco plague outbreak. K.S.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

May 18, 2015
“Aunt Hortense says I try hard to be peculiar. But she’s wrong; I come by it quite naturally,” says Lizzie Kennedy, 13, who reluctantly attends a fussy finishing school in turn-of-the-20th-century San Francisco when she’d rather be making house calls with her father, a kindly doctor. (She and Jacqueline Kelly’s Calpurnia Tate could’ve been BFFs if they had lived nearby.) When Lizzie overhears talk about a bubonic plague outbreak, her father and her uncle, a wealthy newspaper publisher, dismiss it as rumor. Within days, however, Chinatown is quarantined, trapping the Kennedys’ beloved cook, Jing, and marooning his son, Noah, who he had secretly hidden in the Kennedy’s servants’ quarters. Ignoring the social mores that would prohibit Lizzie from befriending a boy her age, a servant’s child, or a Chinese person, she finds Noah much better company than her snooty classmates. A powerful subplot involving Lizzie’s older brother, Billy, shows that the controversy over immunization has long roots. Choldenko, who won a Newbery Honor for Al Capone Does My Shirts, delivers another engaging historical novel about a little-known event. Ages 9–12. Agent: Elizabeth Harding, Curtis Brown.