In the Footprints of the Padres

What begins as one boy's passage across an ocean becomes a meditation on America remaking itself. Charles Warren Stoddard transforms the simple story of a family leaving Rochester, New York for California into a luminous account of frontier hope and the particular magic of the Pacific coast in its first American decades. The young narrator's wonder at the tumultuous sea voyage and his first sight of a young San Francisco, still raw and dreaming, gives the book its beating heart. Stoddard writes with the romantic's eye and the travel writer's instinct for the telling detail, capturing a California that existed only briefly before the modern world arrived. The book moves between memoir and history, between personal discovery and the larger story of a place reinventing itself. It is, ultimately, a book about arrival and what we carry with us when we come to a new land.