The Copy-Cat, and Other Stories

Freeman was a master of New England realism, and these stories capture the fierce inner lives of children with uncanny precision. The title story follows Amelia Wheeler, a plain, poorly dressed girl who worships the beautiful, graceful Lily Jennings at school. Amelia's desperate imitation of Lily, her clothes, her mannerisms, becomes a poignant study in longing and self-erasure. The other stories in this collection follow similar threads: children navigating small-town social hierarchies, clinging to secrets, yearning for connection, discovering who they are through their relationships with others. Freeman treats her young characters with the same psychological complexity she brought to her adult portraits of New England village life. There's cruelty here, and tenderness, and the particular loneliness of childhood, feeling invisible, wanting desperately to belong. The prose is deceptively simple, but beneath it runs something urgent and true. These stories endure because they remember what it felt like to be young and desperate to be seen, to matter, to be loved.