Harebell's Friend

An orphaned girl crosses an ocean and finds herself in a house where no one smiles. Harebell, born Felicia Darrell, arrives in England from India with nothing but her guardian Mr. Graham's vague kindness and the heavy weight of being told her aunt wants nothing to do with her. The aunt, Mrs. Keith, is everything fearful little girls imagine: cold, formal, and unmoved by a child's tears. Yet Harebell, through some stubborn brightness of spirit, refuses to sink into self-pity. She finds unlikely friends: old Andrew the servant, who remembers what warmth feels like, and more surprisingly, the town drunkard whom society has already given up on. Amy Le Feuvre writes with a light touch for a 1914 novel, letting her young heroine's compassion do what stern authority cannot. The book quietly asks whether we are measured by those above us or those below. It endures because it understands that children are often braver than the adults who claim to protect them, and that hope, like harebells themselves, grows in unlikely soil.