FREE: A Drowned Maidens Hair ~ Laura Amy Schlitz

The listing, A Drowned Maidens Hair ~ Laura Amy Schlitz has ended.

Maud Mary Flynn, age eleven, lives at the Barbary Asylum for Female Orphans. She isn't the prettiest or the nicest girl in her class, but she is clever and she likes to make a little trouble every now and again. When the book opens, Maud is singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in one of the school's outhouses in order to keep up her spirits. She knows that at least one of her fellow orphans will be adopted today. At eleven, and not outstandingly pretty, Maud knows her own chances of adoption are slim. Her singing attracts one of the women who have come to adopt a little girl, though, and she ends up going to live with the Hawthorne sisters: businesslike Judith, charismatic Hyacinth, and straitlaced Victoria. With the Hawthornes, Maud wants for little. She has nice dresses, a room of her own, and modern Victorian amenities. But all is not perfect. She has to hide upstairs if a visitor comes, and she cannot go to school. She is a secret child.

What's the secret? The Hawthorne sisters make their living by doing seances, and they're complete frauds. Maud is their key to getting Mrs. Lambert, a wealthy woman with a dead daughter, to pay them enough so they can get out of debt. Maud is going to pose as the deceased Caroline and satisfy all the spiritual (as in ghosts, not religion) wants of her grieving mother.

What's the problem? Maud is too smart and too wanting of freedom to blithely follow all the Hawthorne sisters' rules.


**** Book is in good condition .... paperback .... interesting read!! ****