When almost-16-year-old Aiden Lynch and his little sister, Maddy, first meet trailrider Jefferson J. Jackson, they're eating clay and hunting grasshoppers on the remains of their family's drought-ravaged Kansas farm. In short, the two orphans are starving to death, so when this man Jackson offers an escape--a 2000-mile journey across the roughest country in the world--Aiden knows it's their only choice.

They say there are a hundred ways to die on the Oregon Trail, and the long wagon journey is broken only by catastrophe: wolf attacks, tornadoes, rattlesnakes, deadly river crossings, Indians, and the looming threat of smallpox, "the devil's paint." But with the sky a cornflower blue and the air sweet with new prairie grass, Aiden and Maddy and a hundred fellow travelers move forward with a growing hope, and the promise of a new life in the Washington Territory.

Adventure-filled and historically accurate, Victoria McKernan captures both the peril and stunning beauty of the frontier West in an epic American story at once sweeping and intimate, heartbreaking and hopeful.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Rh Childrens Books
Published: 11/12/2013
ISBN: 9780449816554
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.90w x 1.10d
Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 127761 / Devil's Paintbox
Reading Level: 4.8 / Interest Level: Middle Grade Plus / Point Value: 13