I bought this book at the Unique to sell--it was an impulse purchase on the grounds that it looked like it might be a forgotten favorite that might go for big money on ebay. I'm glad I read it--it is a deliciously unsentimental story. Skinny is an illiterate 12 year old orphan, the son of a sharecropper and a long dead wife, who is now living and working in a hotel in a small unnamed North Carolina town. Miss Bessie is the proprietor and she's love to adopt him, but a young single woman isn't an approved guardian. So Skinny faces the prospect of moving to the orphanage 40 miles away in the mountains. But then engineer Daddy Rabbit arrives on a job and it looks like Skinny might be able to form the family he so dearly wants....
It's a great character study of Skinny, so proud and enterprising and loyal. It's an unusual book in that the ending is so quietly sad. I don't find a lot of books like this for children anymore. And note to self--stay away from men named "Daddy Rabbit."
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