Cynthia Voigt won the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song, the Newbery Honor Award for A Solitary Blue, and the National Book Award Honor for Homecoming, all part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle grade and teen readers, including Izzy, Willy-Nilly, and Jackaroo. She was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for her work in literature, and the Katahdin Award in 2004. She lives in Maine.

Klappentext

The Newbery-winning novel in Cynthia Voigt’s timeless series is repackaged with a modern look.

When Momma abandoned Dicey Tillerman and her three siblings in a mall parking lot and was later traced to an asylum where she lay unrecognizing, unknowing, she left her four children no choice but to get on by themselves. They set off alone on foot over hundreds of miles until they finally found someone to take them in. Gram’s rundown farm isn’t perfect, but they can stay together as a family—which is all Dicey really wanted.

But after watching over the others for so long, it’s hard for Dicey to know what to do now. Her own identity has been so wrapped up in being the caretaker, navigator, penny counter, and decision maker that she’s not sure how to let go of some responsibilities while still keeping a sense of herself. But when the past comes back with devastating force, Dicey sees just how necessary—and painful—letting go can be.

Leseprobe
Dicey´s Song
CHAPTER 1
AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Not the Tillermans. Dicey thought. That wasn’t the way things went for the Tillermans, ever. She wasn’t about to let that get her down. She couldn’t let it get her down — that was what had happened to Momma.

Dicey lay on her back under the wide-branched paper mulberry tree. She opened her eyes and looked up. The paper mulberry had broad leaves that made a pool of shade in which she lay. Thick roots spread around her, making a kind of chair for her to lean on. She wore only shorts in the hot midday air. Her arms and chest were spattered and streaked with red paint, and the barn was completely painted, top to bottom, all four sides, patched and painted and looking good. The paint and sweat were drying on Dicey’s body. She could hear the buzzing of insects and nothing else. For once she was alone, but she knew where everybody was.

Gram had taken James downtown in the motorboat. Gram was going to get groceries and James was going to the library to find some books for Dicey, on repairing and maintaining wooden boats. Maybeth was up in her room, doing some of the many extra assignments her teacher gave her, so she could catch up with the rest of the third graders and not be kept back again. Sammy was out back, on the other side of the old farmhouse, spading up fallow land to increase the size of the vegetable garden. Gram had said, right off, that they would have to do more planting next spring than she’d done for years, with four more people to feed. Dicey suspected that Gram hadn’t been sure how the children would feel about the work.

Well, Gram would learn about them. And they would learn about Gram. There would be some surprises for everyone, Dicey guessed. She knew Gram had already been surprised: at Dicey’s reaction when her sailboat — the one she had hoped over and dreamed over — sank into the shallow water by Gram’s dock. Even James was surprised by how calm she stayed, maybe because he had seen Dicey’s face as they hauled it down the quarter-mile path through the marsh, seen her strain and pull and check to be sure the wheels they’d removed from a wagon and fixed to the legs of the sawhorse cradle didn’t fall off, seen how much it mattered to her.

Dicey had watched the water pouring in through the leaks where the boards had shrunk apart with all those years of drying out. She had watched — they had all stood and watched, as the little boat filled up with water and settled quietly down onto the sandy bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.

“I should have remembered,” Gram had said. “I knew, if only I remembered.”

“You can’t sail in that,” Sammy declared.

Dicey had stared down at the chipped paint on the gunwales of the boat, which still showed above the water. The boat was her lucky charm, her rabbit’s foot, her horseshoe, her pot of gold, it was the prize she’d set for herself for leading them from nowhere to somewhere. OK, she said to herself, thinking about what needed to be done. They’d have to bail it before they could get it out of the water. Then they’d have to take it back to the barn. She told James to find something to bail with. They’d have to slide the cradle back into the water, it would probably take all four children to do that.

“You don’t rest a minute, do you,” Gram had said. Dicey shook her head; she had already gotten used to her grandmother’s way of asking questions without question marks. “But you’d do better to let it sit out here a day or so,” Gram had advised. “Let the wood soak up water, to swell up again. I knew that once, but I forgot. I’m sorry, girl,” she said.

Dicey hadn’t answered, just looked at Gram where she stood on the dock with the wind blowing her curly gray hair around her face.

“Dicey doesn’t mind, as long as she knows what to do about things,” Maybeth told Gram.

“Is that right,” Gram asked Dicey.

“I guess so,” Dicey said.

“What do you do when there’s nothing you can do,” Gram said.

“I dunno, I do something else,” Dicey said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” James pointed out. “That’s illogical.”

Gram looked around at all of them.

“Which one of your sons built this boat?” Dicey asked, but Gram had turned away to go back to the house and didn’t answer.

Remembering that scene, Dicey reminded herself that they all had a lot of learning to do. The boat was back in the barn and she had to begin scraping off the old layers of paint. But not quite yet. Gram and James would be back soon, and they’d have lunch, and then Dicey wanted to go downtown to see about a job. She’d been thinking about what kind of job she could get, all those long first three days of school. There wasn’t much else to think about in school. As far as she was concerned, about all school was good for was using up your days. Dicey hadn’t talked to anyone, except to answer teachers’ questions. That was OK with her, because she had important things to think about. Getting a job, to bring in some money was one. Tillermans always needed more money, because there were so many of them to feed. Dicey knew Gram worried about that. For that matter, Dicey worried about that too, and had worried all her life, because at thirteen, she was the oldest. That worry about food had been her single biggest worry all summer long, when they had traveled down here, after Momma disappeared. The other worries — about what James was thinking, because what James thought in his head told him what to do; about whether or not Maybeth was retarded as people claimed, or only shy, slow, and frightened, which was what Dicey thought; about why Sammy was so angry he hit out and didn’t mind how much the person he fought with hurt him; — those worries, and worries about how much Dicey should give up for her brothers and sisters in order to have any kind of home together — or if she was driving them too hard; about how many miles they had covered and where they were ever going — all the …