THE BALLAD OF LUCY WHIPPLE by Karen Cushman

This blog was created for a TWU course.

Bibliography

Cushman, Karen. 1996. The Ballad of Lucy Whipple. New York: Clarion Books.

Summary
Lucy Whipple is actually California Morning Whipple. She is a young girl during the California Gold Rush. Her family, who lives in Massachusetts, has talked about going to California to find their fortunes. When her father and sibling Golden die of pneumonia Ma decides to move the family anyway. Arriving in Lucky Diggins, California they find a dusty dirty camp town. California decides she does not want a name that is "a place, a passion, a promise." She wants a new name. She decides on Lucy. She says, "It is a very Massachusetts name." Ma starts running a boarding house out of a tent. You meet a lot of interesting boarders throughout the book. Lucy starts selling pies and is saving the money to try and move back to Massachusetts with her grandparents. Hard times hit when Lucy's brother Butte dies and then Lucy Diggins catches fire. Some of the citizens decided to rebuild. Ma had married a tenant name Brother Clyde. They were moving to the Sandwich Islands so Brother Clyde could do missionary work. Lucy had made arrangements to go back east with a girl to take care of her baby. A lady named Mrs. Potterhouse moves into Lucky Diggins and talks about civilizing California and wanting to start a school in Lucky Diggins. Lucy tells her her dream of starting a lending library. She decided that, "home is where I am loved and safe and needed." So she decided to stay in Lucy Diggins.

Analysis
Cushman's writing is very easy to read and provides lots of sarcastic humor portrayed through the main character Lucy. The plot of the story is very typical of families during the California Gold Rush. Many families went west to find their fortune. That fact makes this story very believable. The story holds true to the fact that most families went to find nothing but a lot of hard work and worse conditions than they left at home.

Karen Cushman offers a great insight to life in a mining camp. Right away you can see a stark difference between the main character and her mother. Upon seeing the place they would call home, that is supposed to be littered with gold, Lucy says, "Surely Hell was not far away." Her mother said, "There's gold all around us if you just look." This helps you to understand how Lucy felt about where she was going to live. You get an even better insight into what the camp town of Lucky Diggins is like in Lucy's letters back home to her grandparents. She writes about working to hard, it being to hot and that she is "...a stranger in a land where they even speak a different language, full of derns and dings and have you a pick axe in your clothes." Cushman did include some language from the time frame in the book such as, "I reckon," "looks to be," and "feller." This type of language came mainly from the miners. Lucy and her family talked with more "proper" English. By doing this Cushman reinforced the difference between the mining camps and the lifestyle in Massachusetts.

While the family never does find their fortune and face many hardships along the way you see them grow and change. As you follow them through their journey you see them grow and form bonds with the miners. When Ma decides to marry Brother Clyde and move to the Sandwich Islands you feel happy for her and excited about where her next journey will take her. It is amazing to see Lucy who started as a grouchy little girl that wanted to be back home so bad grow into a young lady that has matured. She now knows that home isn't necessarily a place but a feeling. She decides to stay in Lucky Diggins because she says, "It seems to me home is where I am loved and safe and needed."

The end of the book includes and author's note that talks about how Cushman got he information for the book. There is a list of books that states helped her in her study of California during the gold rush.



Review Excerpts

School Library Journal review - "Cushman's heroine is a delightful character, and the historical setting is authentically portrayed."



Horn Book Magazine review- "What we get is balladic indeed, not just "the extraordinary doin's of ordinary folk" but equally the ordinary doings of extraordinary folk."

Connections

This book would be great to use when talking about the California Gold Rush. It is an excellent way to show the living conditions of the miners. I would read parts of the book and then let the students "pan for gold."