Gold Rush Girl by Avi (review)

When Victoria Blaisdell’s recently unemployed father catches gold fever and intends to head west, it’s Tory’s chance to escape her family’s rigid expectations, and the fourteen-year-old secures her mother’s permission to stow away on the adventure with the understanding that Tory will tend to her father and her young brother, Jacob, when they arrive. None of the Blaisdells could imagine the primitive conditions that would greet them in 1848 San Francisco; the best Father can do is buy them an exorbitantly expensive tent and then leave them with some cash from their house sale back home to tide them over until he returns from the diggings with his fortune. Tory finds herself some men’s clothing and plenty of odd jobs; she even makes the acquaintance of two boys whose fathers have also had their California dream deflated and long to go back east. Disappointment turns to peril when Jacob is “crimped”—kidnapped to serve as cabin boy aboard an eastbound ship—and Tory and her buddies must navigate both the corrupt system that passes for policing in the wild city and the floating forest of abandoned ships, known as Rotten Row, in which Jacob has been hidden until his captors are ready to set sail. Tory’s guilt is palpable, and it serves as a steady counterbalance to the wry humor of her can-do hubris and her life lessons drawn from that thrilling new novel, Jane Eyre. A tad more sedate than Meyer’s Bloody Jack (BCCB 12/02), Tory still delivers the goods for adventure-hungry historical fiction fans.