Josette Dupre begins a journal on her twelfth birthday, in 1846. As her mother, an Ojibwe, dies, she charges Josette with caring for her younger brothers. Their father, a French-Canadian voyageur, takes the children to a buffalo camp, where he joins the hunt. In the meantime, Josette tries to keep the boys out of trouble while learning how to carve up a buffalo and preserve its parts for later use. Later the family joins a cart-train traveling south to St. Paul, a sparsely populated outpost where Josette minds the house, fills in as a teacher for the younger children and observes the town's rapid growth. Inspired by a sentence in the autobiography of a teacher who arrived in St. Paul in 1847, the story provides a close look at conditions on the frontier and the attitudes of the people. The details of everyday life are the most vivid part of this historical novel, which concludes with an afterword and a glossary defining selected Ojibwa, Dakota, and French words.

—Carolyn Phelan, Booklist