A Tie to the Past - Hardcover

Grade 5-9-- Wiseman uses the pretext of a stolen diary to tell the story of the women's suffrage movement in England from the point of view of a fictional imprisoned demonstrator. The girl who has the diary, which she receives from a friend who steals it for a lark from an elderly neighbor, suffers nightmares and psychosomatic illness, both from reading the vivid diary about the hunger strikes and from her guilt in participating in the robbery. Her problems are resolved when she finishes reading the diary, confesses the theft to the owner, and then forwards the name of the diary's writer to the trustees of her school as an alumna worthy of naming the school after. The English background may stymie young American readers, and the construct of the fictional diary, along with the extremity of the psychosomatic illness, make the book fairly improbable and hard to believe. While the diary itself is interesting, it is not as revealing as a story of the Pankhursts, told directly through a biography, or other fictionalized re-creations set in the actual time of the suffragist struggle. --Ruth K. MacDonald, Purdue University Calumet, Hammond,
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