The food is mostly jelly sandwiches and apples very rarely, at depot stops, it is soup or stew. It isn't a freight car, but it isn't comfy: wooden benches, a coal stove, a bucket and dipper for water. Sells 'em to families that want slaves.' He shook his head. All those things are in the cardboard suitcase provided for the journey by the Little Wanderers' Refuge.īefore a policeman took her there, Rodzina lived on the streets, where a friend named Melvin warned her: '' 'That orphanage ships kids on trains to the west,' he said. Her mother faded away and died, leaving only her red and yellow shawl, her statue of the Virgin from Poland, a blue marble that once belonged to one of the little boys and a card from a cousin who has also disappeared. Her father learned that ''there was no place in Chicago for a Polish poet'' and found work only in the slaughterhouses, where he was killed by a runaway horse. Her little brothers died in a house fire. Rodzina is all that is left of the hope the Brodski family brought with them from Poland. This one is carrying 22 children, ranging from big boys to little babies, all being taken west to find new homes. Rodzina Clara Jadwiga Anastazya Brodski's story begins in Chicago, in 1881, as she is about to board a railroad car on an orphan train, as they were known.

For females, the struggle against a strange and hostile world is most particular at 12 and at 67. Her choice of subjects is always excellent. Her Newbery Medal winner, ''The Midwife's Apprentice,'' was about a girl in the Middle Ages sent to be trained by a disagreeable midwife. Her blue eyes, her potato nose, the set of her chin and the downward curl of her lips form Rodzina's ''stink face,'' the glower she uses to drive away, disapprove and resist.Ĭushman has had several successes with novels for middle-grade readers about strong girls, age 12 or thereabouts, facing a hostile, historically distant world. There she is, plaid dress and gingham pinafore stretched over a big, strong, blooming but still girlish body.

TRINA SCHART HYMAN'S marvelous cover illustration for Karen Cushman's new novel, ''Rodzina,'' is irresistible.

Rodzina by Karen Cushman