A Heart for Any Fate

Young adult reading might be a booming market right now, but by any literary standard, it's in trouble. The days of Lois Lowry and Judy Blume are long over, and I honestly don't see how their successors could encourage kids to read (I'm no great fan of wizarding schools, and I'm sick to bloody death of pale teenaged vampires making out in the fog). That's why I'm so happy to have discovered Linda Crew's A Heart For Any Fate, published in 2009 by our very own Ooligan Press. It renews my faith in the Young Adult genre.

The novel is based on (limited) research on the actual King Family, a brood of pioneers who embarked on an ill-fated journey from Missouri to Oregon, the fabled West that sets protagonist Lovisa King's heart pounding. At 17, she is already something of an old maid, living only for her family and shunning the older men set on chaining her to a stove. For her, "West" is "The sound of a wish in a single word" -- a wish that is sorely tested as the family's wagon train takes an ill-advised trip down the infamous "Terrible Trail". The already precocious Lovisa will be forced to grow up as she and her family are hit by every challenege, setback and tragedy that was a sad fact of life for the pioneers.

Kids will love this, even if it is historical fiction. And yes, it's historical fiction, so what? It's a real testament to Crew's talent that a family of pioneers circa-1845 relate so easily. Sure, some of Lovisa's problems are set in the time -- starvation, diptheria, buffalo chips -- but her key dilemmas are ageless: find me one who hasn't been jealous of older siblings, resentful of parents, and insecure about the opposite sex. King does it all without making her heroine a girl-power anachronism; Lovisa is spunky and opinionated, but she still fits in with the morals and mores of the time.

Get your kids, nieces and nephews away from damn Twilight and give them this book. I can promise you they love it, and they will have a slower time outgrowing it.