By Colorado Kids Advisory Board member Andrea Elliott

Title: A Stitch in Time
Author: Ann Rinaldi
Illustrator: (none)
Publisher: Scholastic
Number of Pages: 305

In the first book of this trilogy, Hannah must keep her family together as much as possible while it seems to be falling apart from the inside. She tries to do this partly by using a quilt she is making, where everyone the family trusts will be represented by a piece of fabric.

After a couple chapters of background information, we meet Cabot and Hannah, two of Nathaniel Chelmsford's children. Cabot has a message to deliver to his sister Abby, who plans to marry Captain Nate Videau. However, the message is intercepted by the fourth Chelmsford child, Thankful. She wants to go west with her father, and uses the letter as blackmail for Hannah to convince him to let her go. Luckily, everything works out. The message seals Abby's future, and she elopes that very night to be married to Captain Videau. Just the next morning, the group leaves to travel west. With it are Nathaniel Chelmsford and his children Thankful and Laurence. The two other children, Hannah and Cabot, remain at home.

Soon after that, two more major events occur. Abby's ship, the Swamp Fox, is found wrecked on the shores of an island. Also, Hannah's former beau Louis returns to the Chelmsford home with his young half-Indian daughter for Hannah to care for. She agrees to take on this responsibility, though she doesn't really know how long it will be for.
So many other things happen that I couldn't list them all here even if I wanted to. I wouldn't even if I could because then, knowing everything, you wouldn't bother reading the book! Suffice it to say that you'll be surprised by at least one thing and relieved by at least one more.

Abby has agreed to marry her childhood friend Richard after he returns from his first voyage to sea. He wants to be able to shower his bride with gifts, but until he travels to trade things to other places, he'll just be an ordinary young man. He leaves three days early because otherwise his ship will be attacked by people who suspect him of slavetrading.

A while after Richard leaves, Hannah decides she will keep Night Song (Louis's half-Indian baby) to raise as her own. She is not sure her father will approve of this because of the child's heritage, and this suspicion is made more important when Hannah is informed that her sister Thankful has been taken by the Indians. No one knows where she is. Mr. Leonard, one of the owners of the mill, promises to convince Mr. Chelmsford to allow Hannah to keep Night Song as long as she helps him save the mill from being shut down.

Mr. Chelmsford comes home soon after this, and everything suddenly becomes quite confusing, with many things happening at once. Night Song's christening is arranged and Richard comes home unexpectedly, asking again for Hannah to wait to marry him until after his next voyage. He has too many investors to pay off and not enough of his profits are really his.

In the epilogue, we again see Thankful, now called Much Favored. She is happy with her new life and has no interest in returning to her old one with her father. Though she was his favorite daughter, he was still too unfeeling and didn't recognize Hannah's love for Louis years ago. Now she is sure he would not recognize hers for Cat-That-Prowls, and so is content to remain where she is.

Wow! What a long summary. I don't know how much I could have condensed it though, so oh well. This book is action-packed, though not in the modern sense. It just has lots and lots of things happening all at once. It takes a while to get started in the beginning and I had to read it a couple times to understand it completely. That's pretty much the only bad thing about it. I recommend this book to kids 5th grade and up who like historical fiction and don't mind books with a slow start. I can't really recommend anything similar as I haven't read any books like this before. (March, 2004)