Ruby Sisson Library

The 1880s gold rush in Colorado featuring half a dozen protagonists, among them a miner, a farm girl and a poet. A look at the way people handle success and failure, the trick being not to take either too seriously. By the author of Sierra.

On cover: "...this classic story shows how a young woman can overcome adversity and find true happiness. After her uncle dies, young Jane Eyre is terribly mistreated by her aunt and cousins. She is quickly sent away to a girls' school, where life is not much better. But Jane loves books and learning, and she becomes the first in her class. She goes on to teach, then takes a position with Mr. Rochester, working as a governess. At his mansion, life...

Cherishing the special broom resting above her hearth for its representation of the slave heritage that once forbade legal marriages, Ellen prepares for her parents' triumphant registry at a Reconstruction-era courthouse as lawful husband and wife and proudly carries the broom so that they can repeat a cultural wedding tradition.

An 1888 blizzard has paralyzed much of New England, but twelve-year-old Milton Daub puts on a pair of homemade snowshoes and braves the storm to bring food and medicine to many of his neighbors in the Bronx, New York.

In this new installment in his acclaimed series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the Nez Perce War, with flashbacks to the Civil War. Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian...

"From the creators of Voices from the Oregon Trail and Colonial Voices, an unflinching story of two young runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, told in their voices and those who helped and hindered them It's the 1850s and enslaved siblings Jeb and Mattie are about the make a break for freedom. The pair travel north from Maryland to New Bedford, Massachusetts along the Underground Railroad. Each spread tells about a step of their journey through...

With her brother Thomas injured on the battlefront in the Colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt decides to travel to America to nurse him back to health, but instead she finds injured officer Edward Rokesby, who believes her to be his wife.

A cabin boy on a pirate ship finds himself in San Diego in 1846 as war breaks out between the United States and Mexico. A swashbuckling pirate ship cuts through the early morning fog. Crouching like a tiger about to spring, her figurehead is a huge and ferocious rat with crooked teeth and gouged-out eyes. When the daring Giant Rat of Sumatra drops anchor in San Diego, twelve-year-old cabin boy Shipwreck only wants to begin his long journey home to...

Just as attorney Sarah Woolson begins to investigate a case involving a body found just blocks from her home, a gruesome crime spree throws nineteenth-century San Francisco into a state of panic.