Cynthia Voigt Cynthia Voigt was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but became a Marylander when she and her husband moved to Annapolis. When she began to write, she worked in a basement room of her house, and then moved to a study her husband created by enclosing a back porch. The Voigt family liked to spend their summers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on Philpots Island, just off Matapeake, where they enjoyed boating, crabbing, and swimming, and Voigt absorbed the traditions and lifestyle of a Maryland shorewoman. Dicey takes the challenge of shepherding everyone down Route 1 from Bridgeport to Crisfield because she has to. It's a real, recognizable dilemma, not some burst of fantasy.
Kids can identify with that and immediately see the implications in their own lives.
Return to Top of Page Return to Book List . . . Liza Tillerman tells her four children to stay in the car while she enters a shopping mall, and when she tells the three young children to listen to Dicey, the oldest sibling, the reader is immediately alerted to the problem. The children are being abandoned. Dicey knows of only one living relative, an elderly aunt called Aunt Cilla who sends an annual Christmas card. This relative lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but Dicey, James, Maybeth and Sammy are in a small town in northeast Connecticut.