Emmy

Fülszöveg

It is the summer of 1924 in an Eastern Kentucky mining town and life is hard for eleven-and-ahalf-year-old Emmy Mourfield and her family. Pa has been permanently injured in a serious mining accident, and Ma needs all the help Emmy and her five brothers and sisters can provide to feed and sustain the family. Between helping Ma serve meals to coal company employees, looking after her younger brother and sisters, and caring for Pa, Emmy has little time left over for herself. She does manage once in a while to sneak off to a baseball game or the swimming hole, but the future looks grim when fourteen-year-old Gene, the oldest child in the family, signs on as a miner to keep the Mourfields from being evicted, and is caught in a mine accident. The accident stiffens the resolve of the angry miners to listen to unión organizers, their only hope for protection against an exploitative system. Though hardship and bitterness mark their lives, the closeknit, loving family does not give in to... Tovább

Fülszöveg

It is the summer of 1924 in an Eastern Kentucky mining town and life is hard for eleven-and-ahalf-year-old Emmy Mourfield and her family. Pa has been permanently injured in a serious mining accident, and Ma needs all the help Emmy and her five brothers and sisters can provide to feed and sustain the family. Between helping Ma serve meals to coal company employees, looking after her younger brother and sisters, and caring for Pa, Emmy has little time left over for herself. She does manage once in a while to sneak off to a baseball game or the swimming hole, but the future looks grim when fourteen-year-old Gene, the oldest child in the family, signs on as a miner to keep the Mourfields from being evicted, and is caught in a mine accident. The accident stiffens the resolve of the angry miners to listen to unión organizers, their only hope for protection against an exploitative system. Though hardship and bitterness mark their lives, the closeknit, loving family does not give in to despair- except for Pa. At last, Emmy persuades him to teach her to play his beloved banjo and slowly begins to bring back the loving, laughing, proud man he had always been. Connie Jordán Green, author of The War at Home (an ALA/YASD Best Book for Young Adults in 1989), has written an honest and gripping portrait of a strong, determined family struggling to survive. The unusual setting of an Appalachian mining town, well-drawn characters, and a vivid sense of time and place will entice young readers. Vissza