His sister Annie finds his secret stash of "englische" clothes, a forbidden copy of Treasure Island, and a harmonica. Gideon Stolzfus, 16, chafes under the rigid tenets of his family's local sect, and plans to run away to his uncle's more lenient community. When Isaac Litvak, 12, is injured on an Amish farm, his Jewish peddler father leaves him behind to recuperate with the whispered reminder, "Remember who you are." Though kind and well-meaning, the foreign-speaking family's eating habits and religious laws are strange. In this novel set at the turn of the century, two boys'one Orthodox Jew and the other Amish'are brought together by chance. The author's characterization of the Catholic queen demonstrates there was much more to Mary than the deeds that earned her a sanguinary nickname.
While the pacing is at times uneven, Meyer's (Gideon's People) account convincingly sets the stage for Mary's own sprees of persecution (mentioned in a thorough afterword) and provides an excellent introduction to pre-Renaissance customs, fashions and morals. The novel ends in 1536, just after Henry VIII takes his third wife, Jane Seymour, and things begin to look a bit more optimistic for Mary. The accessible first-person narrative chronicles Mary's dramatic change in status from riches to rags when her father attempts to annul his marriage to Catherine, Mary's mother, and conveys how Mary's (and the nation's) fate is affected by her father's obsession with ""bewitching"" Anne Boleyn, his excessive spending and his execution sprees. The novel begins in 1527 when 11-year-old Mary learns that she has been betrothed to the middle-aged king of France.
Trained not to weep in public, the young princess puts on a steely front but lives in constant fear of her father's tyranny. This riveting slice of fictional royal history paints a sympathetic portrait of Henry VIII's oldest daughter, before she earns the title Bloody Mary.
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