Lizzie and Noah’s secret friendship grows with genuine tenderness and illuminates the differences and injustices that exist within gender, class, and race. She’s desperate to find him, not only for herself, but for Jing’s 12-year-old son, Noah, who is hiding out in Jing’s upstairs room.
When Jing fails to return home, Lizzie fears he may be stuck in Chinatown.
As rumors about the plague infecting San Francisco abound, only Chinatown is put under quarantine. To ease her school loneliness, Lizzie relies on Jing, her family’s beloved cook, who never fails to make her smile. She longs to follow in her father’s footsteps, unheard of for a girl and unlike her grouchy older brother, Billy. (Aug.Infected rats and San Francisco’s dark past at the turn of the 20th century come to light in Newbery Honoree Choldenko’s ( Al Capone Does My Shirts, 2004, etc.) look into an outbreak of bubonic plague.Įven though 13-year-old Lizzie Kennedy attends the prim and proper Miss Barstow’s School for Young Women, courtesy of well-to-do Aunt Hortense and Uncle Karl, she’d rather accompany Papa on his medical house calls. Choldenko, who won a Newbery Honor for Al Capone Does My Shirts, delivers another engaging historical novel about a little-known event. A powerful subplot involving Lizzie’s older brother, Billy, shows that the controversy over immunization has long roots. Ignoring the social mores that would prohibit Lizzie from befriending a boy her age, a servant’s child, or a Chinese person, she finds Noah much better company than her snooty classmates. Within days, however, Chinatown is quarantined, trapping the Kennedys’ beloved cook, Jing, and marooning his son, Noah, who he had secretly hidden in the Kennedy’s servants’ quarters. (She and Jacqueline Kelly’s Calpurnia Tate could’ve been BFFs if they had lived nearby.) When Lizzie overhears talk about a bubonic plague outbreak, her father and her uncle, a wealthy newspaper publisher, dismiss it as rumor. But she’s wrong I come by it quite naturally,” says Lizzie Kennedy, 13, who reluctantly attends a fussy finishing school in turn-of-the-20th-century San Francisco when she’d rather be making house calls with her father, a kindly doctor. “Aunt Hortense says I try hard to be peculiar.
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