Het "John Grier Home

When twenty-three-year-old Sallie McBride receives a letter from her friend Judy requesting she take over as directress of the John Grier Home, an orphanage housing one hundred children, she responds with perfectly justified horror. She is wholly unsuited for the job, she insists, as qualified for managing a hundred orphans as she would be 'for the position of keeper in a zoological garden.' Yet somehow, through some conspiracy of matchmaking friends and a snowstorm that leaves her no choice but to stay, Sallie finds herself installed in the draughty old building with nothing but her wit and stubbornness to see her through. What follows is a delightfully combative education in responsibility. Sallie battles crumbling infrastructure, cantankerous staff, deeply ingrained institutional dysfunction, and, most challenging of all, one hundred children who have long since learned that kindness is temporary and abandonment is permanent. Her evolution from horrified newcomer to something approaching a real guardian makes for precisely the kind of warm, funny, deeply satisfying narrative that defined early 20th-century American women's fiction. The humor lands sharp, the emotional moments earn their weight, and Sallie's voice remains irresistibly alive across every page.