THE WONDER OF CHARLIE ANNE

In this Depression-era novel, a girl named Charlie Anne must take on adult responsibilities when her beloved mother dies in childbirth and her father must go north to work on New Deal roads to avoid losing the family’s farm. Ann Marie Lee does justice to the material with the voice of an entertaining and suitably annoyed-sounding preteen who resents having to answer to an unlikable aunt and who longs to be friends with the new girl, an African-American whom the community looks down upon. Although Lee occasionally lays on Charlie’s accent too thickly, her halting rendition of “Amazing Grace,” which Charlie sings to confront the prejudice at her church, brings a lump to the throat. D.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2010]