While Caroline Was Growing

Spring is calling, and Caroline cannot listen to geography. She sits imprisoned in an uncompromisingly straight chair, chanting Connecticut's boundaries while her heart races toward the window where birds bath in rain-pools and a freckled boy whistles by with a fishing pole. The window is a door to everything her soul demands, yet she is bounded, like it or not, to this room and this lesson and the stultifying expectations of being a proper young lady in an age that had plans for girls. Josephine Daskam Bacon captures something achingly true about childhood: that annihilating tension between the prison of duty and the vast, smelly, twittering world demanding your attention. Caroline is no saint. She is impatient, physical, rebellious, and desperately alive. She unbuttons her boots without thinking, her feet itching for mud. This is a novel for anyone who remembers what it felt like to be young and imprisoned by someone else's schedule, staring out at a world so gorgeous it made you want to scream. It endures because it understands that childhood is not a gentle prelude to life. It is its own country, with its own griefs and glories, and Bacon maps it with tenderness and sharp observation.