A dozen street urchins have a lot to endure in The Castoff Children, the new novel from Connecticut author L.M. Browning. Set at the dawn of the industrial revolution, they’ve been left to fend for themselves on the mean streets of Boston during the hardest winter anyone’s ever known. If it sounds Dickensian, that’s exactly what Browning was going for. The book is geared towards middle-grade readers, but Browning and her publishers debated whether the book should be classified as kid lit at all. (She’s already working on the sequel, with the kids all grown up and living through the Civil War.)
L.M. Browning
