Felicity Saves the Day by Valerie Tripp, 1992.

This is part of the Felicity, An American Girl series.

Felicity’s grandfather is a wealthy man who owns the Kings Cross Plantation.  Every summer, Felicity and her family go to visit him there, and Felicity loves it.  Her grandfather teaches her a lot of things, like which plants can be used for food and medicine, and takes her for horse rides around his estate.

This year, while Felicity’s father and his apprentice Ben are minding the store at home,  Felicity has a special surprise.  As her grandfather inspects a group of horses that a friend wants to sell him, Felicity is stunned to recognize Penny, the horse she freed from an abusive owner in the first book of the series.  Penny is a little thin and dirty but otherwise well, to Felicity’s relief!  Her grandfather purchases Penny for Felicity and promises to keep her safely at his plantation so that Felicity can visit her and ride her regularly.

Felicity is happier than she’s been in a long time and writes an enthusiastic letter home to tell her father and Ben, but soon, she learns that Ben is not at home with her father.  Felicity and her siblings have set up a bird bottle, a special bottle that acts like a bird house for birds to nest in, and she checks it daily to see if there are any birds to show to her little brother.  One day, she finds a message in the bottle from Ben, pleading for help, along with a map to a place in the woods and Ben’s whistle.  When Felicity goes to the spot in the woods and blows the whistle, Ben comes out of hiding.

Ben tells Felicity that he ran away from his apprenticeship to join the revolutionary army.  He wants badly to fight for the colonies’ freedom from England, but he had a bad fall while traveling and hurt his leg.  Felicity tries to convince Ben to let her get help for him and to return to her father to finish his apprenticeship, but Ben doesn’t want Felicity’s grandfather to find out that he’s there or why he ran away because he knows that he disapproves of the revolutionaries.  Because Ben kept her secret when she used to sneak out to see Penny, Felicity reluctantly agrees to keep Ben’s presence a secret for awhile, sneaking him some food and supplies.  She tells Ben that, while she thinks that standing up for what he believes is good, he’s going about it in the wrong way because breaking his apprenticeship was dishonest.

Then, Felicity learns that her father has placed an advertisement in the newspaper with a reward for anyone who can find Ben, and some rough-looking bounty hunters show up at the plantation to inquire about it.  Felicity knows that she must try to convince Ben to return on his own before he gets hurt worse than he already has!

A large part of the Felicity books is about taking responsibility and whether or not it’s right to break rules in the name of a good cause.  Felicity herself broke the rules to befriend Penny and later free her from a master who would probably have killed her.  This story raises the question of whether Ben’s form of rule-breaking is similar to what Felicity did or not.  Their situations and the reasons for their rule-breaking are different.  In her situation, Felicity had tried to behave as lawfully as she could until it became apparent that the only way to save Penny’s life was through rule-breaking.  In Ben’s situation, although he wants to help what he sees as a good cause, his rule-breaking isn’t strictly necessary, and he never tried to discuss his feelings with Felicity’s father and to work out an arrangement before running away because he thought that he already knew what Mr. Merriman would say.  Felicity points these things out to Ben, along with the fact that Ben is not in any real position to help the cause that he supports because he is injured, wanted, and in hiding.  He started on this venture ill-prepared and inconsiderate of the other people who depend on him back home and his own future, and while his belief in the revolutionary cause is genuine, he is also afraid of admitting his mistakes and needs to be urged to make things right.

In the back of the book, there is a section that talks about what people in Colonial America would do during summertime.  The weather in Virginia is hot and humid during the summer, and not everyone would get a chance to travel to the countryside, like Felicity’s family did.  The book talks about various ways colonists would use to cope with heat (keeping the kitchen with its fire separate from the house, eating in an open breezeway in the house, wearing lighter clothes, boys would go swimming although girls didn’t, etc.).  It also talks about life on Virginia plantations, including slavery.