Moon Over Manifest

In 1936, twelve year old Abilene Tucker arrives alone by train in Manifest, Kansas, sent there for the summer by her father Gideon, a man who has never told her much about the town or why he once lived there. Bored and curious, Abilene finds a tin box hidden under a floorboard in her rented room, full of old letters and small keepsakes belonging to two boys, Ned and Jinx, and she and two new friends begin piecing together a story that took place in the same town during 1917 and 1918, chasing rumors of a German spy the townspeople called the Rattler. Manifest's own storyteller, a diviner named Miss Sadie, tells Abilene the older story in installments, and it turns out to be about a mining town straining under exploitative owners, an elixir the boys brewed and sold to raise the money the town needed to buy itself free of those owners, and Ned's death overseas in the First World War, a loss that sent his surviving friend Jinx away from Manifest for good, wracked with guilt he never worked through. Piece by piece Abilene realizes that Jinx was her own father, that the Rattler was never a spy at all, and that Gideon sent her to Manifest specifically so she would learn who he used to be before he could face going back himself. Abilene wires her father a telegram claiming she is ill, and when Gideon arrives to find her well she tells him what she knows; the book ends with the two of them walking into Manifest together to rebuild their lives.

Vanderpool braids the two time periods together chapter by chapter, and the book asks a reader to hold 1936 and 1918 in mind at once, a structure that rewards attentive readers more than younger ones who want a single clean timeline. It reads warmly rather than urgently, closer to a mystery solved through patient listening than through danger, and its portrait of a hard, resourceful Depression era Kansas town gives the whole book its steadiness.