![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() At one point in Janet Lunn's The Root Cellar - a time-slip adventure story first published in 1981, and considered a classic of modern Canadian children's literature - the heroine, Rose Larkin, lying in a quiet hospital room, recalling the terrible tales of war she had just been hearing that afternoon, and reflecting on the deep and lasting hurt inflicted by that war on the soldiers who had fought in it, even on those who had survived, reflects with heartfelt grief: "Being a person's too 's just too hard."That hardness, that difficulty in being a "person" - of not knowing where you belong, or where you should want to belong, or who you even are of not understanding all the complicated forces at work in the world, forces that sometimes help, but often wound, and still being subject to them - is at the heart of this story of a contemporary twelve-year-old girl who, at the death of the grandmother who had raised her, goes to stay with her aunt, uncle and cousins on a small Canadian island just across Lake Ontario from New York state, and finds herself continually thrown back into the past, to the time of the American Civil War.Rose's adventures in the past, as she befriends Susan Anderson and Will Morrissey, who once lived in the very house her aunt and uncle now own her journey south with Susan to discover Will's fate, when he runs off to enlist in the Union Army (being American on his mother's side), come to feel more real to her than her life with Aunt Nan and Uncle Bob, and her four (boy) cousins. ![]()
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