Couloumbis, Audrey.
THE MISADVENTURES OF MAUDE MARCH, OR, TROUBLE RIDES A FAST HORSE
New York : Random, 2005
IL 5-8, RL 4.2
ISBN 0375832459

(2 booktalks)

Orphaned and alone, 11-year-old Sallie March and her sister Maude set out for Independence, Missouri to search for their only remaining relative.  To make the journey safer for them, they dress as boys and off they go to the wild west.  Things may not quite go as Sallie plans though.  You see, the horses they are riding are sort of stolen.  And then they team up with Joe Harden who sort of gets them involved in a bank robbery.  And then things get really interesting when the newspapers pick up the story and embellishes the antics of the kids.  How can two young girls who just want to find a home turn out to be notorious bandits?

Booktalk #2

Eleven-year-old Sallie March is a whip-smart tomboy and voracious reader of Western adventure novels. When she and her sister, Maude, are orphaned for the second time, they decide to escape their new self-serving guardians for the wilds of the frontier and an adventure the likes of which Sallie has only read about. This time, however, the wanted woman isn't a villain out of a dime novel – it's Sallie's very own sister. Narrated by the irrepressible Sallie, what follows is the rollicking story of what really happened out there on the range. Not the lies the papers printed, but the honest-to-goodness truth of how things went from bad to worse and how two very different sisters went from being orphans to being outlaws-and lived to tell the tale.  (Rebecca Caudill Young Readers’ Book Award 2008)