Lavina Cumming has spent her entire first ten years of life on the Bosque Ranch in Arizona Territory with her mother and father, five brothers, and her black mustang pony, Chummy. When her mother dies, her father decides it would be best if Lavina went to live with her aunt, where she can be brought up as a lady.
Starting off at dawn on September 16, 1905, Lavina travels by train to Santa Cruz, California. Armed with the Cumming family motto "courage" she arrives in a world of two-storey houses, automobiles, a new school, and her cousin, "awful Aggie." Trying her best to settle in, Lavina is torn by her hopes to return to Arizona and be with her father. She is as shocked as everyone else by the great earthquake that nearly demolishes the nearby city of San Francisco. In the aftermath of the quake, she must make a big decision about her future. Based on the true story of the author's grandmother, the book includes a short afterword by the author.

 

There are 200 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by Milkweed Editions .

Susan Lowell's family has lived in the American West since Gold Rush days. She is the author of several picture books for children, including The Three Little Javelinas, a Reading Rainbow Book, The Bookmaker and the Elves, winner of a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and Cindy Ellen: A Wild Western Cinderella, also winner of a Spur Award. Her novels for older children are I Am Lavina Cumming and The Boy with the Paper Wings. She and her husband and their two daughters divide their time between Tucson, AZ, and a ranch near the Mexican border.