Mollie Peer: Or the Underground Adventure of the Moosepath League - Softcover

Reid, Van

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608935205 ISBN 13: 9781608935208

Publisher: Down East Books, 2016

Synopsis

During the autumn of 1896 in Portland, Maine, feisty society columnist Mollie Peer believes that a little ragamuffin boy, known only as Bird, is merely the subject of a story that will propel her to the level of a true reporter. Instead, the chain of events she sets in motion, and the heroic people she comes to know, lead her to better understand her own valor and compassion.

About this title

About the Author

Van Reid's family has lived in Edgecomb, Maine, since the 1800s. Reid was a long-time bookseller and lives with his wife and children in a house Reid and his brother built on their family's land. His series of novels about the Moosepath League--of which Mollie Peer is the second--take place in the late 1800s on coastal Maine.

From Kirkus Reviews

A wonderful successor to Reid's Cordelia Underwood (1998), and the second in a trilogy-in-progress that sparkles with neo-Dickensian comedy, romance, and melodrama. The setting is the central Maine seaport city of Portland and environs, in late 1896a scant year after Reid's Pickwickian hero, avuncular Tobias Walton and fellow members (the endearingly naive comrades Eagleton, Ephram, and Thump) of the self- styled Moosepath League stumbled into a wildly linked series of improbable adventures. Well, Tobias is still more or less courting handsome, matronly Phileda McCannon, and the Moosepathians are still finding themselves involved in complicated intrigues: this time, the hiding-away of an endangered four-year-old orphan boy called Bird, who is pursued by the minions of waterfront boss Adam Tweed, and protected by the eponymous Mollie, a stouthearted (and quite fetching) newspaper columnist, Portland baseball hero Wyckford O'Hearn (``the Hibernian Titan''), and courageous old Mrs. Barter, among others. A parallel story brings Tobias into contact with Native American Civil War veteran John Neptune (descended ``from a long line of chiefs and shamans''), the ostensibly doomed victim (Henry Echo) of a family curse, a riddle based on American Indian lore, and a climactic gun battle on the Sheepscot River near Fort Edgecomb, where the answers to several riddles lie buried. It's an irresistible hodgepodge, whose other ``characters'' include the (pseudonymous) Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, a tomcat named Governor Danforth, a raccoon addressed as Eugene, and the amusingly querulous members of neighboring Brunswick's ``Quibbling Society.'' Reid ties all such dangling ends pleasingly together, in a cheerfully overstuffed narrative that bulges with interpolated tales, astonishing reunions and coincidences, and sage authorial interjections. Must we settle for only a trilogy? The canny echoes of Oliver Twist suggest Reid may be working his way through the Dickens canon (Cordelia Underwood was clearly his Pickwick Papers). If so, Nicholas Nickleby is next, and there are eleven Dickenses after that. Stay tuned. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Down East Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1608935205
• ISBN 13: 9781608935208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360