Daddy-Long-Legs

A orphaned girl writes letters to a man she's never met. Jerusha Abbott is the oldest resident at the John Grier Home, a grim orphanage where imagination is considered a liability, when an eccentric trustee offers her something impossible: a college education. There's only one condition. She'll never know who he is. She sees only his shadow, long and strange, so she calls him Daddy-Long-Legs. What follows are the letters she writes to this invisible benefactor, and they are nothing like gratitude notes. They're witty, irascible, full of opinions about Latin grammar and campus architecture and the ridiculousness of young women being taught to cook when they should be learning to think. Jerusha refuses to be precious about her circumstances. She's poor and clever and unapologetically ambitious, and somewhere between her first horrified encounter with a dinner fork and her growing friendship with a fellow student named Jervis, she discovers that education isn't just about learning things - it's about becoming someone who belongs to herself. The novel crackles with humor and quiet subversion, a story about a girl who uses her mind as a weapon and her heart as a compass.