American Classics PDF EPUB

In Apple-Blossom Time

First published: 1919
Pages: 193

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About this book

Clara Louise Burnham subtitled this 1919 novel "A Fairy-Tale to Date," and she holds to that frame by casting her characters as folk-tale figures: an Ogre, a Prince, a Good Fairy. The story follows Geraldine Melody, a young woman left orphaned by her father's death and abandoned by an indifferent stepmother, who ends up stranded on a hardscrabble farm and pressed toward marriage by the grasping Rufus Carder. Her rescue starts with a chance restaurant meeting: Miss Mehitable Upton, a warm-hearted shopkeeper from a fashionable seaside resort, takes the girl's part and sets larger wheels turning. Help eventually arrives through Ben Barry, a young aviator. Written late in Burnham's career, it pairs breezy New England color with the tidy moral shape of a fairy tale, a gentle romance for readers who like their hardships put right.

About the author

Clara Louise Burnham

Clara Louise Burnham built an American career as a novelist and children's writer whose New England settings drew on childhood memories and later summers in Maine. The daughter of composer George Frederick Root, she also wrote verse and texts connected with music before building a long career in fiction.