Read The Courage of Sarah Noble free in the Little Reads app.
The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh is a quiet historical story for 7 year olds about a girl who leaves her family behind and keeps going anyway.
Sarah is eight years old. She is walking to Connecticut with her father so that he can put up a house for them. Her mother stays at home with the baby and all the other children.
Before she sets off her mother fastens her red cloak and tells her to keep up her courage. Sarah says those words to herself for the whole journey. (That cloak does a LOT of work in this book.)
She has offered to do the cooking. She has never made a pie in her life. It is a very big job for a small girl and she knows it.
Most of this story is about being frightened and carrying on anyway. A wolf howls in the dark and Sarah calls out for her father. He answers every single time. That back and forth is really lovely to read.
Her worries are ordinary ones too. She begs her father not to shoot a deer because its eyes are gentle. She will not take her cloak off in a stranger's house because she feels shy in front of their children.
Then her father goes off to work on the house and she is on her own at the shed. Native American children creep in through the fence to stare at her. Sarah says good morning and reads to them, because it is the only thing she can think of to do.
This is a book from 1954 about English settlers in America, and it uses the word "Indians" throughout. Children at one farmhouse tease Sarah horribly, telling her she will have her head chopped off and be skinned alive.
Sarah's father tells her that is nonsense and the friendships she makes are warm ones. The language is still dated though, and the whole story is told from the settlers' side. Lots of families will want to talk about that alongside the reading.
If your reader is happy with short chapters and a slow, steady sort of adventure, this one is very satisfying. Not much happens loudly. Quite a lot happens inside Sarah.
For another girl sent off to the frontier on her own, there is May B in the library. May gets packed off to a neighbour's sod house miles from her family, and things get a good deal harder for her from there.
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