Tomorrow, The River

A teenage girl embarks on an adventure across America and down the Mississippi in this YA historical novel by the author of Together Apart. 1896. With a long list of her mother's dos and don'ts swirling in her head, fourteen-year-old Megan Barnett boards the eastbound train for Burlington, Iowa. Her destination, the Mississippi River, is twenty-four hours and a host of unfamiliar seatmates away. The most pleasant of these characters is Horace, an engineering student whose passion for newspapers, combined with a sharp curve of the tracks, land him nearly in Megan's lap. The parade of interesting strangers-some of whom aren't what they seem-doesn't end with Megan's arrival in Burlington. There she joins her sister's family on a riverboat called the Oh My. River travel, as Megan quickly learns, is fraught with danger, both on the water and off. A keen eye for seeing beneath the surface of things can make all the difference. Leaving a trail of discarded rules and newspaper headlines in her wake, Megan takes on the river and reaps its rewards.

Auteur

Dianne E. Gray's first novel for young people, Holding Up the Earth, won a Willa Literary Award and was selected for the American Library Association's list of Best Books for Young Adults 2001. She grew up on the Nebraska prairie and now makes her home in the Mississippi River town of Winona, Minnesota.