Synopses & Reviews
Chapter OneThe Grove of Trees
Georgie's family was like a grove of trees. There were four of them, standing tall around her, guarding her from sun and wind and snow and every kind of trouble.
Why, then, did Georgie suddenly take it into her head to march out from under their kindly shade and walk nearly half a thousand miles in the glaring heat of summer? Four hundred and fifty miles, carrying that big American flag!
It wasn't until the third week of May that Georgie Dorian Hall knew about the flag. Until then it was packed away in the attic, its stars and stripes folded softly against each other in the dark-star against star, stripe against stripe-deep in the bottom of a cardboard box. Edward Hall didn't know about the flag either. Eddy was Georgie's stepcousin. Well, he was really more like her older brother, because they lived in the same house. Eddy was fascinated that springtime by automobiles, by suspensions and carburetors and transmissions. He was reading a book, "There's Adventure in Your Crankcase. He certainly had no ambition to walk all the way from Concord, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C.
Eddy's sister Eleanor was the oldest of the three children at No. 40 Walden Street.
This year, as always, Eleanor was enthralled by spring. As the sun warmed the ground and the grass gushed up from the wintry lawn, Eleanor came home every day after school and took off her heavy shoes and ran barefoot around the yard. On Saturdays she put on her school clothes again and walked around the town of Concord, looking for a summer job. Maybe she could work in the hardware store, and then Mr. Orth, her French teacher, might come in to buy a hammer or a toaster. Or she might get acashier's job in the Star Market, where Robert Toby worked every summer, unpacking carrots and polishing eggplants.
Eleanor was interested in Robert Toby. Robert was a member of her own freshman class in high school, but he was really Eddy's friend, not hers. He never spoke to Eleanor in school. Running awkwardly around the gym during a basketball game with Wayland or Bedford or Acton-Boxborough, he never noticed Eleanor sitting loyally in the bleachers.
Eleanor tried to tell herself that she would have liked Robert even if his grandfather were not the President of the United States. But she knew in her heart that being the President's grandson gave Robert a lot of extra glamor. She just couldn't help being impressed by Robert's national importance. It was odd that it didn't seem to make any difference to Robert himself. Actually it was impossible to know what Robert thought about anything. He was tall and good-looking but he had an abstracted expression, like someone with his ear to a seashell. He was a modest boy, more interested in insects and butterflies than people.
Georgie, too, had other things on her mind those early weeks in May. She didn't know about the flag in the attic, and she paid no attention to what was happening in the world outside. She was busy with her new friend, Frieda Caldwell. Georgie and Frieda sat side by side in Miss Brisket's fourth-grade homeroom in the Alcott School. After school they always went to Frieda's house or Georgie's to spend the rest of the day. Frieda was small, with clouds of frizzy blond hair escaping from her pigtails. She had big glasses and a small nose and a mouth that was always talking. Georgie was the same size as Frieda, but herwispy hair was no-color, and her arms and legs were like toothpicks. Georgie was quiet and obedient. Frieda was talkative and bossy. They were fast friends.
"Nutty little kids," Eddy would say. "All they do is giggle. Listen to that."
It was true. When they were together, everything seemed funny. If Georgie's shoe was untied, Frieda would double up in hysterics. If Frieda made a horrible face, Georgie would collapse hilariously on the bed. It was as if they shared a secret, a secret kept in whispers, a secret that slipped out in broad smiles and titters and laughter. The secret was their delight in each other's company. They were each other's first best friends.
Aunt Alex was relieved and glad. Her daughter Georgie had always been a sober little girl, with a way of taking things too hard. When Georgie was only four years old she had been desperate to learn to read. And last year she had tried to fly down the stairs. She had fallen down them over and over again in her eagerness to float in the air like a bird, like a goose, like a swan. She had covered herself with bruises.
Therefore Aunt Alex was delighted by the laughter from Georgie's room. She was pleased when she had to call up the stairs, "Georgie, not so much noise!" It was as if ordinary silliness had been building up in Georgie all the time, waiting for Frieda, and now it was coming out all at once.
Aunt Alex and Uncle Freddy were preoccupied too, that month of May. First they had to finish teaching their spring classes at Concord College. The college was their own school, and the classes met in their own house-in the parlor, or the kitchen, or the front hall, or outdoors on the lawn, or even in the branches of a treein the backyard.Next there was the new campaign to keep them busy, the fight against the President's Peace Missile. The Peace Missile was the President's latest nuclear weapon. Aunt Alex and Uncle Freddy were against it. They didn't want him to launch it into outer space. They didn't want him to build it at all. The Concord Journal was full of their plans for a bus trip to Washington, D.C. They were going to march up and down outside the White House carrying signs...
Synopsis
Everything depends on them....
When Georgie Hall decides to walk from Concord, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., with a letter to the President and an old flag capable of producing magical visions, no one doubts that she has the will or ability to do it. Along with her stepcousins Eleanor and Eddy, Georgie begins the Children's Crusade to stop the President from building a globally fatal nuclear bomb, known as the Peace Missile. But 450 miles is a long way to walk, and even as the Crusade picks up members along the way, its marchers can't help but wonder if their actions will make a difference, or if it is already too late....
About the Author
Jane Langton studied astronomy at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan and did graduate work in art history at the University of Michigan and Radcliffe College. Ms. Langton is the author of a dozen books for young people, including seven other fantasies about the Hall family of Concord, Massachusetts: The Diamond in the Window, The Swing in the Summerhouse, The Astonishing Stereoscope, the Newbery Honor Book The Fledgling, The Fragile Flag, The Time Bike, and The Mysterious Circus. Also well known for her mystery novels for adults, Ms. Langton lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts.