about the book
It might have never happened, Bo getting her two burly papas. If one had stopped to tie a shoe lace, they might have missed her, a tiny newborn on her way to an Alaskan orphanage soon to be abandoned by her good-time girl mama. She wouldn’t be Bo now. She’d be someone else.
Gideon “Black Jack” Jackson was from the south. His ma had taught him to cook and he was damn good at it. Arvid “Big Swede” Ivorson knew how to sew rugged-fine shirts and other things, mostly for the finicky good-time girls at the dance hall. When Jack came to town more’n twenty years ago, he was pleased to find someone who could make a shirt to fit him. That was because Swede was as big as he was, and that was pretty big; six five, massive muscled bodies, and hardened fists to match. The two gentle giants with hearts of gold soon became good friends.
They both came as young men to work the Klondike gold rush and stayed after it petered out because they liked the life. They both worked as miners and blacksmiths and they could have been twins, except for the fact they looked nothing alike. Jack was black and Arvid, of course, was a Swede. Together they decided to raise Bo, and this is her story.
It is all about growing up in the dwindling Alaskan gold-rush camp-town of Ballard Creek in the 1920s, learning both English and Eskimo, working hard at everything from making donuts to dancing a polka, running into wild critters including one nasty bear, and meeting all sorts of real quirky characters, including one lost, speechless boy. Precocious and outspoken, Bo is only five, but she and her two massive papas are characters you will never forget!
about the author
With native Athabascan ancestors, award-winning author Kirkpatrick Hill loves her home state, Alaska. She spends her winters in Fairbanks and her summers in the Yukon River village of Ruby. As a mother of six children and the grandmother of eight, there is always a family member ready to read her latest book!
Kirkpatrick studied English and education at Syracuse University in New York. She has been a teacher in Alaska for thirty years. She taught mostly in multigrade classrooms and one-room school houses in the Alaskan “bush.”
Kirkpatrick has written seven books featuring her home state and the people who live there. She lived in a mining camp outside Fairbanks until she was six. Her father worked in a mine. Some of the scenes in Bo at Ballard Creek (the spittoons, the cook shack, the old-timers, and the gramophone) come right from Kirkpatrick’s memories.
Sources:
Author biography: Simon & Schuster
Author biography: Scholastic
Author biography: KidsReads
Also by Kirkpatrick Hill:
Bo at Iditarod Creek (Bo, Book 2). Henry Holt. 2014.
Do Not Pass Go. Margaret K. McElderry Books. 2007.
Dancing at the Odinochka. Margaret K. McELderry Books. 2005.
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