Dorothy Dale - A Girl of Today

Dorothy Dale is fourteen years old, motherless, and running a small-town newspaper with her Civil War veteran father in Dalton, New York. When Major Frank Dale isn't tending to his G.A.R. duties or holding forth at the local hotel, he's at The Bugle, and Dorothy is right there beside him, earning her nickname "Little Captain" through genuine grit and newspaper ink under her fingernails. She's sensible beyond her years, but not preternaturally so - she's simply a girl who knows her own mind while the world expects her to be idle and ornamental. Her best friend is Octavia Travers, a girl the town calls wild because she'd rather walk in the woods than sit in a schoolroom, dismissed as an idler by everyone except Dorothy and Tavia's father. This is early twentieth-century girls' fiction at its most spirited: a story about loyalty to the misunderstood, the dignity of meaningful work, and the particular courage it takes to be yourself in a world with narrow expectations. The first book in a thirteen-book series from the Stratemeyer Syndicate that helped define American girls' literature.