Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-Day

In 1908 Dalton, New York, fourteen-year-old Dorothy Dale is the kind of girl who leads processions on Decoration Day and stands by her friends when the world turns unfair. Daughter of Major Frank Dale, a Civil War veteran running the local weekly newspaper, Dorothy possesses that irrepressible quality modern readers might call 'main character energy' , sunny, determined, and utterly unwilling to accept injustice, whether from a strict teacher or the expectations pressed upon young women of her era. When her best friend Tavia Travers suffers punishment that doesn't fit the crime, Dorothy must navigate the tricky territory between respecting authority and fighting for what's right. The result is a window into early 20th-century small-town life , its pageantry, its social pressures, and its quietly revolutionary acts of friendship. For readers who crave wholesome period adventures where the heroine's greatest weapon is her unshakable decency, this book remains remarkably alive over a century later. It's for anyone who remembers being young and convinced the world could be better than it is.