Title: Looking for Orlando
Description: (From the dust cover of the book). 
Stepping off the train at the little Southern Pennsylvania station of West Chester in the Summer of 1851, young Sam Chase is looking forward to a vacation of hard work, good food, and fun on the farm of his Quaker grandfather, Nathan Richards.  Raised in the South, where his father is a prosperous cotton broker, Sam has always taken the slavery question for granted.  

But slavery is very much on the minds of his devout grandparents, and his young and pretty Aunt Rachel.  As Quakers, they abhor a system that permits one man to “own” another.  But Sam never guesses that their placid farm home is a station on the famed Underground Railroad for runaway slaves until the morning Constable Hopkins suddenly appears with a search warrant.  To Sam’s great surprise, an old school friend of his from Baltimore, Wesley Owens, is with the Constable.  They’re looking for Orlando, a runaway from Wesley’s father’s estate, and they suspect Sam’s grandfather of harboring him!

Their search fails to uncover Orlando, but the brutal and mercenary attitude of the Constable uncovers new and confusing feelings in Sam.  However, it is only when he accidentally discovers the frightened Orlando hiding in the ditch by the road, and instinctively wants to help him, that he learns for the first time what the slavery issue means to him - and which side he is on.  

Excitement mounts when Sam becomes actively involved in the workings of the railroad.  He helps his aunt and grandparents to hide parties of fugitives in a secret cellar under the farmhouse kitchen and then, under cover of night, drives them to the next station on their route.  

Well depicted are the conflicting loyalties of the various characters, including Wesley Owens, who begins by tracking Orlando down and ends by wanting to see him set free.  How this is accomplished with the aid of some quick thinking - and quicker action - by Sam makes for a suspenseful climax to this strong recreation of a dramatic period in American history.  It was a period when one’s deepest convictions were put to the hard test of action; a period not without it parallels today.
Subjects: Juvenile fiction, Underground Railroad, Quaker religion, Southeast PA
Places: Kennet Square PA, Philadelphia PA
Time periods: Pre-Civil War rural Pennsylvania, 1851