Mollie Peer: or, The Underground Adventure of the Moosepath League - Softcover

Van Reid, whose family has lived in Maine since the eighteenth century, has for the last eight years been assistant manager of the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta.

A wonderful successor to Reid's Cordelia Underwood (1998), and the second in a trilogy-in-progress that sparkles with neo-Dickensian comedy, romance, and melodrama. The setting is the central Maine seaport city of Portland and environs, in late 1896a scant year after Reid's Pickwickian hero, avuncular Tobias Walton and fellow members (the endearingly naive comrades Eagleton, Ephram, and Thump) of the self- styled Moosepath League stumbled into a wildly linked series of improbable adventures. Well, Tobias is still more or less courting handsome, matronly Phileda McCannon, and the Moosepathians are still finding themselves involved in complicated intrigues: this time, the hiding-away of an endangered four-year-old orphan boy called Bird, who is pursued by the minions of waterfront boss Adam Tweed, and protected by the eponymous Mollie, a stouthearted (and quite fetching) newspaper columnist, Portland baseball hero Wyckford O'Hearn (``the Hibernian Titan''), and courageous old Mrs. Barter, among others. A parallel story brings Tobias into contact with Native American Civil War veteran John Neptune (descended ``from a long line of chiefs and shamans''), the ostensibly doomed victim (Henry Echo) of a family curse, a riddle based on American Indian lore, and a climactic gun battle on the Sheepscot River near Fort Edgecomb, where the answers to several riddles lie buried. It's an irresistible hodgepodge, whose other ``characters'' include the (pseudonymous) Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, a tomcat named Governor Danforth, a raccoon addressed as Eugene, and the amusingly querulous members of neighboring Brunswick's ``Quibbling Society.'' Reid ties all such dangling ends pleasingly together, in a cheerfully overstuffed narrative that bulges with interpolated tales, astonishing reunions and coincidences, and sage authorial interjections. Must we settle for only a trilogy? The canny echoes of Oliver Twist suggest Reid may be working his way through the Dickens canon (Cordelia Underwood was clearly his Pickwick Papers). If so, Nicholas Nickleby is next, and there are eleven Dickenses after that. Stay tuned. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.