Product Description

In 1908, eleven-year-old Innie joins the library club at a settlement house that serves immigrant families of Boston's North End, but when items and money disappear from the settlement house, Innie's past as a troublemaker puts her under suspicion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1047515 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 163 pages

From School Library Journal

Gr 4-6-A story that will appeal to readers who are ready to move beyond the original "American Girls" series. In 1908, Boston's North End is home to Italian and Jewish immigrants jammed into tenement housing. Innie Moretti, 11, lives in just such a place. She and her cousin, Teresa, join a local settlement house, which helps immigrants learn skills to cope with American life. The girls participate in its library club, where they are astonished to learn that they can check out books. However, when items start disappearing and a mysterious light is seen in the basement, Innie and her friends wonder if the house is haunted or if a thief is at work. While the mystery element is fairly straightforward, the historical information is intriguing. An afterword offers additional period details with documentary photographs and illustrations. This series entry brings history alive through lively and appealing characters.-Kristen Oravec, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Strongsville, OH

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Living History
This book is spirited, only the "ghosts" here have real legs, and they walk right into today's world, as our own foremothers. The writer is talented enough to make the emotions real, without sugar-coating or preaching. Her sense of place is as good as her sense of people. The immigrant girls clash with the expectations of their own families about them, and find themselves in conflict with the granite-like solidity, self-assurance, and at times denseness of high-principled Yankee settlement workers (who cannot quite trust them). There is a mysterious theft which brings out the economic differences cruelly. Based on an historic settlement house in Boston's North End, where teenaged immigrants from Italy and Russia produced pottery that has now great collector value (Paul Revere Pottery's Saturday Evening Girls, in the Arts and Crafts style), eventual triumph is hidden in portents of disaster. In this story, understanding between the girls themselves foreshadows the eventual detente between different ethnic factions in later years, and celebrates the capacity of a great city, Boston, to nurture generations of new Americans. Those of us whose families partake of some (or in my case all) of the ethnic streams mentioned, can take an especially delicious satisfaction in sensing how but for some amazing grace, it wouldn't have turned out so well. I know Boston well enough to know how good this story is. It makes me want to read the others to connect with the history of other places. If this is where American Girl stories are going, it's a fine trend.

Is The Settlement House Haunted?
That's the key question in this "history mystery". The setting is Boston's North End in 1908. Innocenza "Innie" Moretti, an eleven-year-old girl, lives in a tenement with her Uncle Giovanni's family and her grandmother. Her parents were killed in a fire when she was only two. She loves the club for girls from immigrant families at the new settlement house in her neighborhood. Here she can listen to stories, borrow books, and make new friends. But when things begin disappearing from the settlement house, and other things turn up in odd places, suspicion fastens on Innie. Helped by her new friend, a Jewish girl from Russia named Matela, Innie must find out what is going on. Is there a thief, or is the house haunted?

Readers of "Under Copp's Hill" experience late night vigils in an old cemetery and explore a dank old tunnel. The plot is not complicated, but there is plenty of tension for pre-teens as Innie tries to solve the mystery before she is kicked out of the club. Beyond that, the story also has something to say about the difficulties faced by immigrants in America in the early 1900's, and about how people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds could put their old-world differences behind them. All in all, this is another fine entry in the "history mystery" series. My daughter now ranks "Under Copp's Hill" as her second favorite of the nine we've read so far, behind only "The Smuggler's Treasure". I recommend the entire series to young readers and their parents.

Another good History Mysteries book.
Every since her Italian immigrant parents died in a fire when she was just two, Innie Moretti has lived with her grandmother in a tenament in Boston's North End. The year is 1908, and Innie is now twelve. When a settlement house for girls opens in her neighborhood, Innie is eager to attend, and join the library club. However, soon things start to dissapear from the house. Because she is thought of as a troublemaker due to several incidents that were not really her fault, Innie immediatley falls under suspicion for the thefts. If she doesn't prove that she is innocent, Innie will no longer be able to attend the library club, and reading is one of the few joys in her dreary, tedious, and difficult life. So she determines to solve the mystery and catch the real thief. While not the best from the series, this was still an excellant book that I reccomend to girls who enjoy historical fiction.