Wanderville: Escape to the World’s Fair
The fair of the title is the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Five abandoned children are escaping from villainous Miss DeHaven, who—in past volumes of the series—chaperoned their orphan train and forced them to work on a farm. The opening scene finds the kids on a railroad handcar heading west towards their imaginary children’s paradise of “Wanderville” in California. An encounter with the eccentric Mr. Zogby changes their course, as he offers them money to take a gold medallion to a certain person at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He pays for their steamboat tickets, but once on board they scuffle with some boys being taken to work in a nasty-sounding cannery. Miss DeHaven turns up on the boat and has all the children locked into an animal pen after they steal food, but the kids manage to elude her and slip into the Fair. Will they find the mysterious friend of Zogby, and receive enough reward to get them to California, or will Miss DeHaven catch them first?
McClure will keep readers with a short attention span interested with a plot that includes lots of action. The story will enlighten today’s children about the plight of their homeless counterparts a century ago—material suitable for supplemental reading in a history or sociology lesson. However, I found the rest of the history rather transparent, and did not get a good sense of time or place either on the boat or at the fair due to too much careering from one action scene to the next. I had trouble keeping the characters straight, as there wasn’t a lot of development. Perhaps if I’d read the two previous volumes, that would have been less of a problem. It’s a good concept for a children’s series, but the execution in this volume is more superficial than memorable.
