Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance; Or, the Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners

Billie Bradley is the kind of girl who walks into a quiet schoolroom looking for a forgotten textbook and walks out having accidentally destroyed a valuable statue. That's just how her adventures begin. When Billie breaks the treasured school statue, she faces a hundred-dollar debt that might as well be a million. Her solution: an unexpected inheritance from a distant relative. There's just one catch. The old homestead at Cherry Corners is located in the middle of nowhere, comes with a reputation for being "queer," and Billie has never even seen it. Together with her friends Laura and Violet, she heads to the isolated farm to claim her birthright and discover what secrets her mysterious relative left behind. First published in 1920, this is adventure fiction from an era when girls were expected to be brave, resourceful, and a little bit daring. Billie Bradley is no shrinking violet. She's a problem-solver who meets trouble head-on. The stakes are small by adult standards, but they're enormous to a teenage girl in 1920, and that specificity is what gives the story its charm.