Desperate Journey

12 year old Maggie and her family work along the Erie Canal hauling cargo. Each day is the dame until Maggie's father and end up getting arresting for assault. It's up to Maggie, her bother, and her mother to carry the load and make it in time for the bonus money they need to pay off their debts. This is the story for their "Desperate Journey".

DESPERATE JOURNEY by Jim Murphy tells of pre-teen Maggie, whose father loses all their money in a fight with an Erie Canal bully, placing the family in danger of losing their boat. The only way out is to work harder - but when her elders are arrested it's up to Maggie and her mother and brother to race against time to get the job done.

I gave a copy of Desperate Journeys to my friend's 11-year-old son for his birthday, and he just loved it. Even though the main character is a girl, the adventure and setting really appealed to him. Jim Murphy builds in lots of suspense to the story, and you feel as if you're traveling along the Erie Canal with the family of 12-year-old Maggie Haggerty. I've personally read a lot of canal history, and this book brings that part of our history to life better than anything I've read before, either for adults or kids. This is a terrific book!

Desperate Journey is a riveting novel! Maggie is a truly compelling character who, with her family, triumphs against all odds. Set against the backdrop of mid 19th century upstate New York, the story paints a broad protrait of immigrant families, canal life, and the meeting of city of country. Local color, humor, and tension and a story worthy of film treatment. Middle grade readers should love this. Teachers will want to require this as historical fiction that opens up the world of westward expansion and canal life to young readers. Jim Murphy brings his fine sense of storytelling and sense of historical detail to this well-crafted story.

Like every other child born in the state of Michigan, I had the history of that fine state stuffed into my little brain from an early age. I learned about assembly lines and the state bird and what a Petoskey stone was. And what song did we sing each and every year in music class? Well, it began, "I've got a mule, her name is Sal." Yup. "Erie Canal", was a classic little ditty, but somehow the story of the canal never fastened itself firmly enough in my brain. What better place then to set a historical novel? Credit author Jim Murphy for thinking it up in the first place. He plops the reader down smack dab in the middle of what could only be described as a watery stretch of lawlessness and gives the whole book a sense of the danger that went with the territory. Surprisingly poor on a couple of his details, Murphy is sometimes wholly engaging and sometimes wholly confusing. In the end, the book is great read, but only for those kids that don't mind stumbling through a tale that is difficult to continually imagine. What do you do when your father, who never lost a fight a day of his life, loses one to the nastiest bully on the Erie Canal? You go on with your life and your job, that's what. For twelve-year-old Maggie and her family, that's just what they're trying to do. Papa lost a lot of money to a man named Long-fingered John and now the family is going to try to make an extra bonus on the ship's goods they're carrying to make it up. Unfortunately it never rains but it pours. Soon Papa and Uncle Hen are arrested for the attempted murder of a man found beaten in an alley and it's up to Mama and her children to finish the job they're on. Mama, however, is sick and Eamon (Maggie's little brother) is too small to do a man's work. That leaves Maggie to make the tough decisions. Do they trust the strange straggler who keeps offering them his help? How will they get around the many bottlenecks around the locks? Is that mule limping? Things are never easy when working the Canal is your life, but Maggie's got more strength than anyone has ever given her credit for. Not many children's books grab you right from the start, but "Desperate Journey" did. I picked this title up idly in a bookstore intending to give it a quick go and then move on to meatier fare. Five chapters later I was still giving it that "quick go" and finding that my hands literally did not want to put the title down. Now the only books I'd ever read that were written by Mr. Murphy were, up until this point in time, non-fiction titles. Mr. Murphy knows how to take a moment in history, be it a plague of Yellow Fever or Chicago in flames, and make it entirely accessible to his young readers. And when you think about it, the Erie Canal was kind of an event as well. As the book mentions in the historical note at the end, the 363-mile-long water route was a feat of engineering the like of which no one had ever seen before. I suppose that if he had wanted to, Mr.