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Book Review of Hitty: Her First Hundred Years

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years
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I requested this book from PBS because I have the newer shortened edition and I wanted to read the whole book.. The book is about Hitty a wooden doll carved in the early 1800s and a recount of her owner/mistresses over the hundred years. It is a book written by Rachel Fields and Illustrated by Dorothy Lathrop. The actual doll featured in the book is in a Eastern Doll Museum.

Written in 1929 and brought back out in 1957. It is a Newberry Award winner and based for readers 8-12 but is still an interesting book to read for all ages. This book is the 1966 version.

Hitty is created by an old Irish Peddler during a snow storm & blizzard in Maine. He carried a piece of Mountain Ash wood from Ireland to his new home in America for the wood was considered lucky. He made the doll for a girl named Phoebe Preble. Phoebe's father was a sea captain and ended up taking her and her mother on a whaling expedition. They were ship wrecked on a South Sea island where Hitty became an idol for the native islanders. Upon the family's rescue, Hitty was accidentally lost in India and became the possession of a snake charmer, a missionary child, an artist's model, a model for a wedding dress at the Cotton Exposition, a child on a riverboat, a slave child's and finally an unclaimed box in the dead letter file. Life continues thru all the years, until she discovers that she can tell her story while staying in an antique shop.