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The Unexpected Lives of Ordinary Girls book cover
The Unexpected Lives of Ordinary Girls
2025
First Published
5.00
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages

A child of immigrants feels caught between two worlds and two selves in this powerful, luminous middle grade historical novel about self-determination, community, and what it means to belong—perfect for fans of Esperanza Rising and Katherine Marsh’s The Lost Year. When your family comes from Slovenia, you get used to being called a Bohunk—someone who’s ignorant, lazy, and still has Old World farm dirt in their ears. Someone from a place that people don’t care enough about to learn its real name. Stanislava feels stuck in her deeply traditional Slovene community in Colorado in 1910. But when she finds a library book about an immigrant girl’s college adventure, she discovers a dazzling world of opportunity. She’s desperate to be like the book’s heroine, Katinka, who starts life anew as Katie and is seemingly living the American dream. So, like Katie, Stanislava adopts an “American” Sylvia. Sylvia fantasizes about escaping her claustrophobic life and going off to college—until her dreams are shattered when her older sister, Stina, elopes with a man their family disapproves of. Now Sylvia finds herself at a quit school to fill Stina’s role as the family’s caretaker or run away from home. Stanislava would do the former. But Sylvia is determined to be free…

Avg Rating
5.00
Number of Ratings
5
5 STARS
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Author

J. Anderson Coats
J. Anderson Coats
Author · 10 books
J. Anderson Coats has received two Junior Library Guild selections, two Washington State Book Awards, and earned starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, the Horn Book Review, and Shelf Awareness. Her newest books are A Season Most Unfair, a middle grade historical set in medieval England about a girl with something to prove; and The Night Ride, a middle grade action-adventure about horses in danger and kids who want to save them – if they can. She is also the author of Spindle and Dagger, The Green Children of Woolpit, R is for Rebel, The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming, and The Wicked and the Just. A YA novel, The Loss of the Burying Ground, is forthcoming from Candlewick Press in 2025.
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