Moon Over Manifest
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| Author | Clare Vanderpool |
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| Cover artist | Richard Tuschman |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's literature, Historical fiction |
| Publisher | Delacorte Press |
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Publication date
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May 2, 1995 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 351 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 460709773 |
| LC Class | PZ7.P28393 Mo 2010 |
Moon Over Manifest is a 2010 children's novel written by American author Clare Vanderpool. The book was awarded the 2011 Newbery Medal for excellence in children's literature, the Spur Award for best Western juvenile fiction, and was named a Kansas Notable Book. The story follows a young and adventurous girl named Abilene who is sent to Manifest, Kansas by her father in the summer of 1936. The author's note at the end of the book states that the fictional town of Manifest, Kansas, is based on the real town of Frontenac, Kansas.
The main character in the book is Abilene Tucker, she is a nice, and adventurous girl who lived in the time of 1936. Her father sent her to a small town called Manifest, Kansas while he worked a railroad job somewhere else. She arrived there to find that it was run-down and greatly affected by the Great Depression. A pastor took her in, and in that house, she discovered a box of mementos and letters stashed away under a floorboard. One letter mentioned the "Rattler," someone Abilene and her two friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, believed was a German spy in 1918. After some investigating, they received a note telling them to "leave well enough alone." Realizing that she had lost her father's compass while searching for the spy, Abilene walked down the Path to Perdition to search for it and accidentally broke a diviner's pot. To pay off her debt and earn her compass back from the diviner, Abilene did odd jobs for her. For example, she tilled dry soil during a drought, planted seeds in it, and hunted for strange plants, all of which seemed to have no useful purpose.
Sensing that Abilene was feeling abandoned by her father, the diviner told her a story of the past about two boys in Manifest in 1918 called Jinx and Ned. Jinx was a twelve-year-old con artist who left his partner after thinking he accidentally killed a man, and Ned was a fifteen-year-old boy who used Jinx's skills to sign up for the army underage. At the time, the town was controlled by the owners of the mine because there were no jobs or money without them during the war; the owners paid the poor workers very little and forced them to work more shifts, or else they'd be fired.
After a land-owning man died, the mine owners desired that piece of land for their own profit. However, the town had first pick, and they needed to raise $1,000 for it before the deadline. They didn't want the mine owners to know about it, or else they'd give them more work and also stop them from raising the money, so everyone feigned illness and put the town under quarantine to get rid of the mine owners. They sold a healing elixir and raised most of the money, but someone revealed their plans to the mine owners, causing them to return and put everyone back to work.
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