Andrews, Virginia C.
New York: (1990) Dawn


Dawn Longchamp and her mom, dad, and brother Jimmy are used to moving to many different towns, because of her fathers job, or so she thought. When he gets a job as a maintenance worker in a private school, Dawn and Jimmy get to go to the school for free! While at the private school Dawn meets a new friend, Laura, a boyfriend, Phillip Cutler, and she also meets Phillip's snobby sister, Clara Sue. Also, at the school, Dawn joins the choir and performs a solo that Clara Sue thinks should be her's. Dawn soon realizes that she has a passion for music, so she also takes piano lessons. Soon after she and Jimmy were enrolled in the school and their new sister, Fern, was born, Dawn's mother becomes very ill. Because the Longchamps don't have very much money, Mrs. Longchamp goes untreated, and dies in a hospital. Just a few weeks later, the story begins to rise, and an officer comes to their crowded apartment, and tells Dawn that she was kidnapped. Dawn learns that she was born as Eugenia Cutler, the same Cutler as Phillip and Clara Sue. Dawn's family is extremely rich and owns their own hotel, but she has a mother and a father who don't seem to care about anything, and a grandmother who is cruel and thinks Dawn should go back to the name Eugenia. Dawn refuses to change her name, so she is not allowed to eat until she does. Some short time after that, Dawn learns that Mr. Cutler isn't her real father, and her grandmother thought that was sinful, so she hired the Longchamps to kidnap her. When Dawn learns that she is devastated, and her grandmother decides to send her away to the Sara Bernhardt School for the Performing Arts, so she can study music, which is in the next book, Secrets of the Morning.

The setting of this book is mainly in Cutlers Cove, Virginia. This small village is where Cutlers Hotel is located, and where Dawn's family lives. Cutler's Cove is just like a town, it has stores, houses, and a beach, but the best part is the hotel. The hotel is meant for rich guests, and is loaded with things to do, including lots of chores for the chambermaids and Dawn.

I highly recommend this book to someone that likes to read, or someone that likes books that are about people. This book would probably be for people in middle and high school, because younger children might not understand everything. This book is fairly long, around 400 pages, but even if you don't like to read, this book is so interesting you can't stop reading it.

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 10/10