Merridy Road

by Jane D. Abbott, Josephine Reiniger (Illustrator)

The story of Wicks Farth and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Dicket, who travel in an old Ford all over the country, until an accident involves them in a new kind of adventure.

301 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Jane Ludlow Drake Abbott (1879-1962) was an American author who began her career writing for adolescent girls, and went on to write adult romance. Born in Buffalo, New York, to a family involved in the shipbuilding industry of the Great Lakes region, she was educated at Cornell University, and married Buffalo attorney Frank A. Abbott. Most of her twenty juvenile titles were published under the name Jane D. Abbott, although a few were released under the name Jane Abbott. Her adult titles were all released under the name Jane Abbott.

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dicket Farth and her father Wicks had always lived a carefree life on the road, roaming about in their dusty contraption of a car, Mary-Anne. Then one day, on Dicket's fifteenth birthday, they were involved in an accident just outside of a small town named Endfield. Terribly injured, they were carried to the Merridy Road home of Car'line Brant and her brother Saul, where they most unexpectedly found a haven. Cared for by their generous hostess, who declared that it would not have been "Christian-like" to do otherwise, they slowly began to recover. An imaginative and goodhearted girl with little experience of other children, Dicket soon made friends on the road, from the irrepressible Dory (Dorcas Julia) and her sister Jule (Julia Dorcas), to the universally despised Holly Oliver, assumed by all the people thereabouts to be as dishonest as his shiftless drunk of a father. Over the course of the summer season, she learned quite a bit about both the joy and pain of friendship, experiencing the pleasure of belonging to a secret club and the anguish of discovering that one's friend's are not always constant in their affections. Throughout it all Dicket herself remained steadfast and true, forgiving small betrayals, working to better understanding between all the girls of Merridy Road, and standing by Holly when he was falsely accused. Full of hope that her father, confined to an invalid chair, might fully recover, Dicket dreamed that they could finally settle down, right there on Merridy Road...

The third children's novel I have read from Jane (D.) Abbott, following upon her 1920 school story, Highacres , and her 1932 holiday adventure, The Young Dalfreys , Merridy Road (1930) was an engaging tale, and featured an appealing young heroine. There were times when Dicket, with her enthusiasm, many questions for Car'line Brant, and imaginative appreciation of the world around her, reminded me of Anne Shirley, the eponymous heroine of L.M. Montgomery's classic Anne of Green Gables . That is high praise indeed! Abbott, who spent most of her life in the Buffalo, New York area, seems to have set many of her stories in that same northwestern region of the state, and this is no exception. I assume that the 'Endfield' in the story refers to Enfield, a small town in Tompkins County. She also seems quite fond of the name Dicket, which I had never encountered before, but which she also used in her 1933 boarding-school story, Dicket: A Story of Friendships . Although none of the events chronicled in Merridy Road were particularly surprising - surely, in stories such as this, disability and misfortune are always temporary, and difficulties and disagreements are amicably resolved? - I nevertheless enjoyed following along as our heroine, her father, and her many new friends, find their way through to a happy ending. The sub-plot involving Holly Oliver and his dog Clown was immensely poignant, and the way Dicket confronted the entire town in his defense, inspiring. Although not without her own ideas of class, in which like finds like, Abbott often seems to argue against petty snobbery in her stories, undermining the idea that money (or in the case of Holly, good family) is a determining factor in the worth of one's character. This is an idea that can also be seen in Highacres and The Young Dalfreys . All in all, an engaging novel, one I would recommend to readers interested in Jane Abbott's work specifically, or vintage American girls' fiction in general.