Despite her charming levity, Prussian aristocrat and cell leader Frau Becker is grimly aware of the stakes. They meet a colorful band of upper-class types who seem almost too whimsical to be serious. During one such raid, a mortally wounded man stumbles into the white German family’s home and gasps out his last wish: “The Führer must die.” With this nighttime visitation, Max and Gerta discover their parents have been part of a resistance cell, and the siblings want in. Max, 12, lives with his parents and his older sister in a Berlin that’s under constant air bombardment. Near the end of World War II, two kids join their parents in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. With a story that is less a period piece than a timeless and richly comic coming-of-age story, Cushman remains on a roll. Arvella eventually moves on, but Lucy has not only lost her desire to leave California, but found a vocation as well: town librarian. Other characters are drawn with a broader brush, a shambling platoon of unwashed miners with hearts (and in one case, teeth) of gold. Ever willing to lose herself in a book when she should be doing errands, Lucy is an irresistible teenager her lively narration and stubborn, slightly naive self-confidence (as well as a taste for colorful invective: ``Gol durn, rip-snortin' rumhole and cussed, dad-blamed, dag diggety, thundering pisspot,'' she storms) recall the narrator of Catherine, Called Birdy (1994), without seeming as anachronistic.
It's a far cry from Massachusetts as her mother determinedly settles in, California rebelliously changes her name to Lucy and starts saving every penny for the trip back east. Arvella Whipple and her three children, Sierra, Butte, and 11-year-old California Morning, make a fresh start in Lucky Diggins, a town of mud, tents, and rough-hewn residents. The recent Newbery medalist plunks down two more strong-minded women, this time in an 1849 mining camp-a milieu far removed from the Middle Ages of her first novels, but not all that different when it comes to living standards.
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