Gennifer Choldenko (Al Capone Does My Shirts) dives back into San Francisco history in Chasing Secrets, an exciting novel set during the city's 1900 bubonic plague outbreak, told in the lively voice of a 13-year-old girl named Lizzie Kennedy.
Lizzie is a doctor's daughter, and loves it when Papa takes her along as his assistant... and not just because it's a nice break from Miss Barstow's School for Young Women where girls are prepped more for pleasing husbands than setting bones. Her protective Aunt Hortense frowns upon Lizzie's doctoring, her coarse talk of warts, even her sense of humor: "Aunt Hortense says I try hard to be peculiar. But she's wrong; I come by it quite naturally," quips Lizzie. The discovery of 87 dead rats in a restaurant wall is the plague's clarion call, and despite the epidemic's naysayers, Lizzie knows something is seriously wrong when her dear friend, the family's Chinese cook Jing, goes missing, possibly quarantined in Chinatown. Choldenko masterfully builds the suspense of Lizzie's attempts to rescue Jing, and the story intensifies when Lizzie discovers Jing's charming 12-year-old son, Noah, hiding in their own house. In wonderfully frank closed-door conversations, Noah opens Lizzie's eyes to racial injustice... and a side of her longtime friend Jing she never even considered.
Not only will this novel hold a proud spot on the deadly disease shelf with Jim Murphy's An American Plague and Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793, it's a vivid picture of 20th-century San Francisco and a stirring story of a lonely, funny girl trying to be her "best true self." --Karin Snelson, children's editor, Shelf Awareness