Dorothy

A foundling on a doorstep. A postman's family. A child who grows up wondering where she came from. In early 20th-century New England, baby Dorothy is left on the doorstep of John and Mary Chester, a working-class couple whose love is matched only by their modest means. She becomes their daughter, their Dorothy, though the mystery of her origins follows her through childhood. By twelve, she's a girl of spirit and warmth, until a stranger seizes her for ransom, dragging her into danger she never imagined. Yet even in peril, she finds an unexpected ally in Jim, the boy everyone calls "the nobody" a social outcast with his own wounds and his own courage. Evelyn Raymond wrote with clear-eyed tenderness about what it means to belong to no one and everyone at once. The novel captures the particular anxieties and hopes of early 20th-century American life: a father's fragile health, a family's precarious finances, a child's fierce determination to define herself despite the world's labels. Dorothy is not Oz. She is something more intimate and perhaps more radical: a girl who must build her own story from the fragments others have left behind. For readers who love historical fiction about resilient children finding their people.