Polly Oliver's Problem

Polly Oliver is seventeen and running a boarding house in California, which is not the life she imagined. Her father is dead, her mother is failing, and the only future on offer involves serving meals to tiresome lodgers. But Polly has a secret plan: she wants to be a kindergarten teacher, part of a radical new movement in education that's just reaching America from Germany. When the family doctor prescribes a change of climate, Polly must bundle her mother onto a train to San Francisco and figure out how to build a new life from nothing. What follows is both a comic campaign to evict the boarding house's unwanted guests and a quieter story about daughters becoming women, about learning that responsibility and dreams don't have to be enemies. Wiggin, who helped found the first free kindergarten in America, wrote from experience: this is the book she might have written if Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm had been forced to grow up faster.