The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (review)

Twelve-year-old Cissy Sissney is itching to get away from her mother's nagging and her father's shop, and she gets her chance when a diphtheria outbreak and a runaway silo necessitate her prompt removal to a new residence, at least temporarily. Accompanied by two schoolmates, her straightlaced teacher, and the local engineer unjustly fired for his presumed role in the unfortunate silo affair, Cissy tracks down her idol—her former schoolmistress Miss Loucien, a red-headed bombshell who's now a member of the Bright Lights theater troupe, and a very pregnant (and now married) one at that. The company has just taken possession of a grounded wreck of a steamboat, which they set afloat at the height of a seasonal flood. Taking on a few new acts, they carom haphazardly between riverbanks, delighting entertainment-starved rustics. Their casual finders-keepers claim on the Sunshine Queen is disputed, however, by the gamblers who lost her in a swindle and are now armed and determined to take her back. The troupe handily evades them and also holds out against a river pirate (he lands in jail) and a spoiled-brat gambler (he's obliterated in an explosion), but they nearly meet their match when their owner is sentenced to hang for a crime he didn't commit. Cissy steps into a wildly inaccurate Queen Victoria disguise, they borrow a train and, in the performance of their collective lives, convince a sheriff and mayor to release the accused into their custody in recognition of a bogus British Clemency Day. Families who enjoying reading aloud together couldn't do much better than this, as McCaughrean's humor (broad and wry) is matched by her loving attention to language and her rapid-fire deployment of deftly crafted similes. Mark Twain and Sid Fleischman must surely be nodding their posthumous approval of so imaginative a cast and so preposterous and cunningly devised a plot—exactly the kind of story for which the term "rollicking" was coined.