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Duey, Kathleen
EMMA EILEEN GROVE, Mississippi River, 1865
(AMERICAN DIARIES)
New York : Aladdin, 1997
IL 5-8
ISBN 0689803850
Emma and her little sister are trying to reach the safe haven of their uncle's home in St. Louis. Their mother has died of fever, their father, a soldier for the Confedracy, hasn't written in months and they fear he is dead. The SULTANA, a steamboat filled with released Yankee prisoners covered with sores and lice, as well as the civilian passengers, braves the flooded Mississippi. The boilers explode in the middle of the night. People with every reason to hate each other must cooperate to survive. Emma and her sister hold onto a piece of decking along with an African American stevadore, a sheltered, middle-aged southern belle, a Yankee, thin and weak from prison, and a drunken gambler. This disaster, the worst in American history (more people died than on Titanic!) is obscure because Lincoln's assasination about a week before overshadowed the news.
(Kathleen Duey, author. kathleen@cts.com)
SUBJECTS:     Sultana (Steamboat) -- Fiction
                        United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
                        Shipwrecks -- Fiction

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