Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
"IT'S STILL TRUE."
That's the first thing James Tillerman says to his sister Dicey every morning. It's still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillerman children somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It's still true they have to find their way, somehow, to Great-aunt Cilla's house in Bridgeport, which may be their only hope of staying together as a family.
But when they get to Bridgeport, they learn that Great-aunt Cilla has died, and the home they find with her daughter, Eunice, isn't the permanent haven they've been searching for. So their journey continues to its unexpected conclusion -- and some surprising discoveries about their history, and their future.
Abandoned by their mother, four children begin a search for a home and an identity.
Sequel: Dicey's song.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Booklist Review
Abandoned by their momma in a shopping center, Dicey Tillerman and her three younger brothers and sisters eventually make their way to their unknown grandmother in the hopes of finding a home.
Kirkus Book Review
These are some of the things youngsters will find in this uncommonly capacious, resonant first novel: the exact, excruciating value of a dollar; the psychological price of gratitude; why, by contrast, a good enemy ""might make a good friend."" At the outset, 13-year-old Dicey Tillerman is left in charge of younger brothers James (ten) and Sammy (six), and little sister Maybeth (nine), in a Pautucket, R.I., parking lot; and she's not surprised when, by the next morning, troubled, vacant Momma hasn't come back. So it's on to Great-aunt Cilia's--rich, Great-aunt Cilla's, by the occasional cards she's sent--in Bridgeport, Conn.: two hours by freeway but upwards of two weeks (Dicey loses track) on foot. For all Dicey's penny-pinching and the children's scrounging, their meager funds trickle away (is it wrong, then, for scrappy Sammy to steal picknickers' surplus food?); but the children's belief in their mother's love (they were poor and fatherless back in Provincetown, and stigmatized as bastards--but not in their own eyes piteous), along with Dicey's mettle, sees them through. On a rainy night in New Haven, a student takes them in; and the next day his social-responsibility-preaching roommate--counterpart to an earlier social-dropout contact--casually takes them to Bridgeport and casually drops them off. (Did he ever give them another thought, Dicey wonders.) Aunt Cilla, who wasn't rich, is dead; her narrow, rigid daughter Eunice, who has never heard of the children, is planning to be a nun. She takes the four in, however, as a ""Christian deed""--happy because James is smart (and will be a credit to her), satisfied if Dicey does the housework as she's told. But what will happen to shy, outwardly-retarded Maybeth? or defiant, trouble-making Sammy? Especially now that Momma, as the children learn, is in a Massachusetts mental hospital, deemed incurable? Go-getter Dicey earns money washing windows and, aware now that her mother's mother is alive (if perhaps crazy too) on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, determines to scout the prospects. And that--after other, diverse encounters (including one with a slightly-too-flawless black circus owner)--brings Dicey and the others, but especially Dicey, smack up against the woman who immediately knows they're her grandchildren but won't (till the end) call herself their grandmother. As for Dicey: ""Here was the place, a farm with plenty of room and plenty of work for them to do, and the bay just beyond the marshes, and a sailboat in the barn. She wasn't about to let this grandmother keep them from it."" No literary pretensions and, welcomely, no single Message; but lots of small, unstressed lessons amid the upheavals and tremors of life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.