by Robert Lawson
188 pp.
"Your fortune lies to the west. Keep your face to the sunset . . . and one day you’ll ride the greatest wheel in all the world." When Aunt Honora reads this fortune in his tea leaves, Conn Kilroy knows he is destined for greater things than his small Irish village can offer. A letter from his uncle Michael in America offering Conn a partnership in his New York contracting company sets Conn on his western adventure. Just a few short months later Conn’s Uncle Patrick lures him even farther west to Chicago, where they join the hardworking crew building what some called Ferris’s Folly—the first Ferris wheel—then the largest wheel in the world and the showpiece of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
Who even thought there was a time when something like a Ferris wheel was a marvel, much less an engineering feat that many people thought would be impossible to accomplish? Lawson's book does a good job of capturing the spirit of the late nineteenth century, when everyone was infected with the notion that science, engineering, pluck, and good old Yankee knowhow would have all of creation bending to their will. This is a wholesome and engaging story that also presents an opportunity for parents to raise some deeper questions about the attitudes of that age.
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