Abe Lincoln at last!

Abe Lincoln at Last! is Mary Pope Osborne's time-travel adventure for 7 year olds about trying to get a word with a president who has no time to spare.

What happens

Jack and Annie are collecting four things to undo a spell. Teddy put it on Merlin's penguin by accident, which is very much Teddy all over, and now she is a stone statue.

Two things found. Two to go.

The third is a feather from a hero's hand, and the hero appears to be Abraham Lincoln.

They land in a grove of bare trees in 1861 and there is the White House, with a crowd pushing at the front door. Anyone could walk in back then. Most of them want something from him.

Then a small boy spots the tree house and claims it.

Tad Lincoln is the best thing in this book. He is about seven, he is in full pirate mode, he shakes his fists at Jack and shouts fight me, then two minutes later shakes hands very politely and offers to help. His brother Willie is the calm one who keeps apologising for him.

If you have ever had two children in the house with exactly those settings, this will feel familiar.

What it feels like to read is busy and warm. Hoopskirts swirling, someone banging on a piano, Tad marching backwards up the drive and nearly walking into a carriage.

The history slips in around that. Jack reads a line or two from his research book and a child picks up 1861, the White House, and why the president could barely get any work done.

That research book also states, plainly and in one sentence, that Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. It is not a scene and nothing about it happens in the story. Still, it is the sort of line a seven year old stops on, so you may want to be nearby for the question that follows. The same page says he outlawed slavery, which is another conversation waiting to happen.

Neither is handled darkly. They are simply there.

What to read next

For more of the tree house landing in real history, try Twister on Tuesday. It is in the library, it is the prairie trip Annie mentions in passing here, and it comes with a one-room schoolhouse and a very large storm.