The day Garnet found a silver thimble in the sand by the river, she knew her summer would be magical. Nine-year-old Garnet lives on a farm in Wisconsin and drought threatens to ruin the crops, but that changes with the finding of the thimble as a storm moved through that very night.
Many good things happen that summer that Garnet attributes to the luck of the thimble. Eric, a runaway orphan, joins their family. She and her friend, Citronella (What a name!!) get locked in the library for half the night. Her father gets a government loan to build a new barn. She has an argument with her brother, Jay, and runs away, hitch-hiking, but luckily she gets help from friendly strangers. She enters her pig into a contest at the fair and ... I won't tell.
I'm not sure exactly when the book takes place. Maybe it is contemporary with the publication (1938), but I think it is set a little earlier. The book really reminds us of the innocence of farm life in the early twentieth century with children hitch-hiking, orphans taking care of themselves and great-grandmothers who tell wonderful stories from their childhoods.
Enright, Elizabeth. Thimble Summer. Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1938
The next book, Daniel Boone by James Daugherty, is not in our local library or any of the school libraries I have access to, so I'm not sure when I will blog about it. So up next is the 1941 winner, Call it Courage.
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