The Wanigan

By Gloria Whelan

Book Overview

Before the spring of 1878, 11-year-old Annabel Lee had never even heard of a wanigan. But she and her mother are now stranded on the small floating cookshack for three months while her father and the other loggers move their timber down the river to the mills at Lake Huron. With a constant threat of forest fires, timber pirates, and log jams, it's a perilous journey, especially for a delicate girl who'd rather read poetry than live in the rough company of loggers. But the Au Sable river and its shores soon reveal their beauties. And by the time the wanigan nears Lake Huron, Annabel can't imagine waking up without a brand-new surprise outside her window each morning. In a novel of rugged river adventure and evocative nature writing, Gloria Whelan brings 19th-century history--and one girl's summer river journey--to life for young readers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375814299
• ISBN13: 9780375814297
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Length: 133 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.3"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

Thrilling Voyage

Compelling as well as useful, THE WANIGAN, A LIFE ON THE RIVER, is a vivid description of the late 19th-century felling of Michigan's pine forests: how it was done; who the workers were; how they lived. Annabel, THE WANIGAN'S 11-year old narrator, is the priggish but spirited daughter of a lumberjack and his assistant-to-the-camp-cook wife. Annabel and Jimmy, the 12 year-old camp chore boy, go along when the year's crop of logs gets shepherded down river toward the sawmills by their fathers' crew. Annabel's mother is cook for the journey; she and Annabel live and cook in the crew's floating kitchen, or wanigan. The gruelling 3-month journey has a tidy share of griefs and alarms. Annabel must face the fact that a pie-eating raccoon is not a pet to keep in a kitchen, even were this "kitchen" not doubling as her and her mother's sleeping quarters. (Bereft in her one-room waterborne shack, poor Annabel dreams that she has "a castle full of well-behaved raccoons.") Forest fire threaten to leap the river and make ashes of the journeyers, all but helpless in midstream. Murderous log rustlers are thwarted only by the quick thinking and courage of Jimmy and Annabel. (Unpolished Jimmy, at first disdained by the prim Annabel, is her good friend by journey's end.) As to lumbering's cost to Michigan, Gloria Whelan's book is neither preachy nor insensitive. Annabel's father, a displaced city man who has seen better days and means to see more, takes on his dangerous job to provide a home for his family. Native of the region Tom Johnson,an Indian, as Annabel calls him (tribe means nothing to her), refers obliquely once or twice to the sadness of the changes he has seen, and goes on logging: it's his living. Annabel's painfully desired new house in Detroit may well get built with boards from trees Tom and her father have helped fell. Annabel is allowed share Gloria Whelan's sharp ear and eye for nature, speaking of "a crow whose caw was half bark and half cough," of 'strange plants with faces like tiny suns and little hairs growing in a circle around the suns, on each hair a drop of glistening dew.' On her arducous journey toward civilization, she learns to appreciate the soaring of a hawk as much as the thinness of a demitasse, learns to appreciate important virtues in males whom she initially dismissed as 'coarse.' (The dead poet she admires isn't much use when her father is drowining, but a few men who spit tobacco and rub their feet with lard may well be.) The rough loggers Annabel comes to care for mostly take no thought for tomorrow, and, once the journey is over, little thought for the past, including Annabel. That is not so of her new friend Jimmy, and perhaps some day we may be granted a sequel to THE WANIGAN. This book, nicely illustrated by Emily Martindale (see her good map, p. 134, before you even begin reading), will be supremely useful in connection with a unit on the Industrial Revolution and westward expansion, on 19th century American histo