Aurora County – A Long Line of Cakes

Deborah Wiles's A Long Line of Cakes is a small-town story for 8 year olds about a girl who has decided not to make any more friends.

What happens

The Cakes arrive at midnight. Eight of them, four dogs, seven bicycles strapped to the van, rolling into a Mississippi town of four hundred people who are all fast asleep.

Every Cake is named after a cake. Emma Alabama Lane Cake is eleven and the only one who minds the moving. Her five brothers will each have a new friend before breakfast. They always do.

Emma has moved seven times that she can remember and more that she can't. She keeps a Friend Atlas, a rolled-up map of every place she's lived and everyone she left there. Harriet, who she left behind at eight. Evangeline, at nine. Mariposa, at ten. She unrolls it on her new bed and tries not to cry.

Then she puts her hand on the silver maple behind the bakery and feels something under the bark like a heartbeat. There's a folded pink note tucked in the knothole. She writes one of her own and pushes it in beside it.

The town is the other half of the book. Miss Mattie Perkins opens her shop at dawn, spots the van and rings her sister-in-law to shout at her about it. Four hungry boys wander in, drop a box of oats all over her spotless floor, and the eldest gets a broom pushed at him and is informed that he is now indentured. Then a redheaded girl in blue overalls comes through the double screen doors at a dead run, because the quickest way to that tree is straight through Miss Mattie's shop.

Wiles writes a place as though it were a person. The fog plays leapfrog with the muggy air. The breeze scatters it, eddies round Emma and whispers yes when she asks whether they can stay. It's warm and unhurried and very funny, and a lot of the jokes are simply about how many brothers there are.

One small heads-up. The boys mark their arrival with a peeing contest in the lane, at midnight, and their mother is no more impressed than you are.

This is one of a set of books set in Aurora County, and people wander through with their own stories clearly going on elsewhere. It reads perfectly well on its own, because Emma is new here too and the town gets introduced to her along with your reader.

What to read next

If it's the crowd of siblings your reader enjoys, the Problim children are seven, they live at House Number Seven in a place called Lost Cove, and half the town is working quite hard to get rid of them.