Elsie at the World's Fair

The year is 1893. The place is Chicago, where the White City rises from the lakefront in a dazzling vision of electric light, Moorish palaces, and a nation showing off its industrial muscle. For Elsie Dinsmore and her family, the World's Fair isn't just an excursion, it's a passage into the extraordinary. Finley, whose Elsie series became a Victorian phenomenon, invites readers along for a grand family adventure. The sons prepare with the breathless anticipation only children can muster. Extended family gathers. Romance threads through the narrative like garland at a May celebration. The fairgrounds become a theatre of marvels: the Ferris wheel's first turn, the promise of electricity, cultures from across the world displayed in elaborate pavilions. What endures is less the spectacle than the bonds that frame it characters who love loudly and well, who find joy in each other's company, who treat life's ordinary moments as worth celebrating.