A PEBBLE AND A PEN

By Joan Donaldson Holiday House Ages 10 and up 154 pp., $15.95

Fourteen-year-old Matty Harris has a dream. With her pen, she wants to make letters that swoop across the page like a swallow. But it's 1853, and she lives in the backwoods of Michigan. Matty's father, who shared her love of learning, is dead. Her mother, perpetually cross, has her hands full raising two-year-old Teddy and doesn't understand Matty's passion for penmanship. And her older brother, Abe, is very busy working the land. But the day her mother burns her beloved book where she practices her letters, Matty resolves to run away.

With Abe's help, she secretly boards a train and heads to Ohio to attend the school of master penman Platt Rogers Spencer. Matty soon finds herself sharing a room with the Spencers' daughter Sara and learning penmanship with a classroom full of boys.

Matty learns some important lessons during her summer with the Spencers. She rises above being heckled and teased. She learns that her greatest obstacle in perfecting penmanship is her own impatience. And she absorbs the art of drawing out the beauty of simple things.

There are American history details woven into this enjoyable novel for the young reader. Platt Rogers Spencer really was a master penman.

Any Cinderella tendencies of the story (mean mother, too many chores, and later a summer dance where Matty appears in a beautiful dress) do meet up with reality. A letter from Abe, pleading with Matty to return and care for her mother and little brother, who have fallen ill, turns her homeward. And Matty picks up her old life the same way she has learned to pick up her pen, with a gentle yielding to grace.