Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin
ChironBooks (2008)
ISBN 9781935178026
Reviewed by Neha N. Kashmiri (age 14) for Reader Views (1/09)
After Martindale is hit by a flood and everyone she knew is either dead or gone, Anna is sent to live with Shakers by her father. Shakers are stern and strange religious people that Anna doesn’t fit in with. All she wants is to go back to Martindale and have everything as it was. But that’s not possible. All Anna can do is wish for her father to find a job and come get her.
While living with the Shakers, a soon-to-be-famous man visits and Anna finds out that her schoolmistress was once a free-spirit who came to live in Goshen. Anna wonders how someone who had written inspirational poetry could live with the strict Shakers.
Anna also meets Sally, another girl who doesn’t fit in with the Shakers. Sally wants to run away from Goshen and marry her sweetheart. But Shakers aren’t supposed to marry. Sally manages to convince Anna to help pass letters between her sweetheart and her without having any of the elders find out.
Anna asks an old friend of her father, Brother Seth, to help her with this task. With Anna’s and Brother Seth’s help Sally and her sweetheart manage to arrange a midnight meeting, a meeting that goes horribly wrong.
One of these friendships proves dangerous to Anna, but she manages to escape with her life. Then her father comes and takes her to Boston, where she has to learn a whole new set of rules. But her year living with the Shakers has changed Anna and she can’t seem to fit in here either. And what’s worse, the murderous friend follows Anna to Boston. Can Anna get away with her life a second time?
“Anna’s World” by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin was much better than my expectations, mostly because I don’t like books that occur during war times, usually because there are long and boring details about battles that I don’t care about. But “Anna’s World” had none of that and the only place where the Mexican War is mentioned is in a speech that really wasn’t that bad. Also, the book is written so well that I flipped pages faster than I ever have. I haven’t ever liked a historical fiction so much and definitely recommend this one to everyone.
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