Reviews: (by author)

Schwabach, Karen. A Pickpocket’s Tale. New York: Random House, 2006. ISBN 0-375-83379-X. $15.95 U.S. / $21.00 CAN. Middle Grade. www.randomhouse.com/kids

A work of historical fiction, A Pickpocket’s Tale by Karen Schwabach is not for the faint of heart. It’s gritty and sometimes sad. But it’s also heartwarming.

Picture it: London, 1731. Life is hard for Molly, a ten-year-old orphan who makes her living as a pickpocket. We don’t meet her picking pockets, however. We meet her at Newgate Prison waiting in a line with other prisoners to be sentenced, possibly to be hanged. By some miracle she’s sentenced, not to death, but to seven years as an indentured servant in the American colonies.

Then enter Mr. Lopez and Mr. Mendez, two English Jews who visit Molly in prison as she waits to be transported by ship. The two men confirm that Molly is also Jewish; committed to looking after their own, they arrange for her to be bought by a Jewish family when she arrives at the New York colony.

Enter the Bell family: Mr. Bell, Mrs. Bell, David (the teenage son), Rachel (the three-year-old), and Arabella (the Black slave). Molly, of course, doesn’t want to be bought by anybody. The moment she arrives in New York she’s already thinking of ways to arrange a passage back to London. But with no immediate way back, there’s nowhere to go except to the Jewish family who bought her to be their indentured servant.

For the first time since her mother’s death, Molly has a safe place to sleep, food, clothes, and people who genuinely care about her well-being. She makes friends with David, and she grows to care for Rachel. She learns Jewish customs and attends synagogue, and she learns how to read.

Yet, despite the new warmth in her life, Molly still wants to return to London. Or does she? What does Molly want? Only she can decide.

A Pickpocket’s Tale is very much about Molly’s growth and struggle to figure out where she belongs, with the Bells in New York or in London as a pickpocket. She’s a wonderfully complex character. As an orphan in London she has to be tough to survive; at the same time, she has a good heart, and secretly, she’s a softy. A conversation with David reveals how vulnerable she really is:

David seemed to change his mind about what he was going to say. “Things are pretty tough over there. So why would you want to go back? Do you have family?”

Molly felt tears well in her eyes, and she turned her head away angrily. “No,” she said.

“Then why?”

She wasn’t very good at answering questions like this. Because, she thought, my whole life hurts. I feel broken into a million pieces, and I just want to find whatever pieces I can.

“Because London is where I was born,” she said. New York was just…a place far from London. A nowhere place. An edge place. A place on the edge of real. (126)

Once you get to know Molly, it’s hard not to care about her.

And the historical detail is amazing. Karen Schwabach did her homework. Here’s Newgate Prison for you:

The smell assaulted her before she opened her eyes. It was a stench of unwashed clothes and bodies, of rotting straw and waste, of bad liquor and bad teeth and the seeping miasma of jail fever and death.

She was in the Hold, the underground dungeon assigned to sentenced prisoners who had no money to pay for a cell above ground. Someone must have carried her here. A prisoner, or a bailiff? Would she have to pay them for it? You had to pay for everything in Newgate: your food, your cell, everything. Even your chains—if you could pay to have your chains removed, the turnkeys took them off. Otherwise they left them on.

Molly sat up on the cold, damp floor. Something crackled under her. At first she thought it was straw, but when she took up a handful, she found it was insects. Dead insects. Heaps of them, centuries of them, enough to cover the floor, like straw or sand. (8)

The history is fascinating if not disturbing at times. But the details are never gory or gratuitous.

Karen Schwabach has blessed us with a gritty and beautiful first novel. If we’re lucky she’ll bless us with many more.

Marie Soriano, June 2007

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