Maggie among the Seneca - Hardcover

Robin Moore, whose family has lived in the Pennsylvania mountains for two hundred years, makes his living as an author and storyteller.Since 1981, he has presented more than two thousand programs and workshops at schools, museums, and festivals. His programs combine both traditional and original North American stories with demonstrations of old-time living skills.Before turning to storytelling, Robin served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, earned a journalism degree from Pennsylvania State University, and worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor.He now lives with his wife, Jacqueline, and their children, Jesse and Rachel, in a stone farmhouse on a small patch of land in Montgomery County, just north of Philadelphia.Mr. Moore is also the author of MAGGIE AMONG THE SENECA, the sequel to THE BREAD SISTER OF SINKING CREEK.

It is the summer of 1778, and 16-year-old Maggie Callahan is traveling through central Pennsylvania in search of her aunt and uncle, her only surviving family. She was first introduced in The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek (Lippincott, 1990), and this book doesn't tell readers how Maggie arrived in these woods alone. She is captured by the Seneca, adopted by them, given to a Seneca in marriage, watches him die from a wolf attack, gives birth to a baby, runs away from a British officer who tries to recapture her, loses her baby to an old mysterious Indian woman, and fights bitter cold and near starvation in making her way back to her aunt, whose tavern on the Allegheny she manages to find. So many things happen to Maggie that there is little space for anything else, and her strength through all of these adversities borders on the unbelievable. Also, three other main characters are not given the development they need. Frenchgirl, another adopted Seneca, is given only casual consideration, even though she is pivotal to Maggie's life in the tribe. Firefly, Frenchgirl's brother and Maggie's husband, is a completely mysterious character. He is described as blond and blue-eyed, but readers are not told if he is Frenchgirl's natural brother--and if he is, why he can't speak English as she can. And an eccentric old woman appears to be nothing more than Moore's device to take Maggie's baby from her so she can make a clean break from the Seneca. The prose is flawed, and many of the descriptive phrases are overdone. Although the book's relatively easy reading level makes it accessible to middle-grade readers, many of the events will be lost on them, or will be beyond their emotional ken. --Jane Marino, White Plains Public Library, NY
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