Swift Rivers (A Newbery Honor book)

Barred from his family home- stead by his mean-spirited uncle, eighteen-year-old Chris weathers a Minnesota winter in a small cabin with his grandfather. Poverty and the tempting stories of a wandering Easterner convince Chris to harvest the trees on his grandfather's land and float the logs down the spring floodwaters of the Mississippi to the lumber mills in Saint Louis. Filled with stories of raft hands and river pilots, this fast-paced novel has all the momentum of the great Mississippi.

Cornelia Meigs was a prolific children's book author who began her career in 1915 and continued to write into the 1970s. She won the Newbery Medal in 1934 for Invincible Louisa, her biography of Louisa May Alcott. She lived in Havre de Grace, Maryland, at the time of her death in 1973.