When Net Galley offers a book by Karen Cushman, I know I need to make a request. Known best for her Newbery Award winners, Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife’s Apprentice, she is in her element when she sets her books in her home state of Oregon. In Karen’s newest release on March 25, When Sally O’Malley Discovered the Sea takes the reader through that territory when it was still the frontier.
Aging out of the orphanage at ten and being thrown out of the hotel where she worked as a hired girl at thirteen brings Sally to an offhand suggestion of going west at the local store and the desire to see the end of the land and, even more important, the sea. Heading west, she joins a lady named Major who has a wagon, a contrary donkey named Mable and a loyal dog named Sarge. Major’s business is making deliveries of various kinds along her route. On one of these deliveries, they pick up another orphan from better circumstances called Lafayette Maurice Winnbiggler, a thorn in Sally’s side, who is being sent to relatives in Astoria.
The journey to the sea for the group takes a hazardous trip through the wilderness landscape of Oregon in the 1800s with Sally learning coping skills as she faces each difficulty. Sally’s inner journey from distrusting almost everybody, including herself, to finding good people that she can rely on evolves during the time it gets to the sea. The parallel journeys form the arc of the story and will appeal to those who love Karen Cushman’s take on historical fiction.