Georgie Burkhardt doesn't believe that her sister is actually dead. The only way for Georgie to find out is to take it upon herself to track down exactly what happened to Agatha. Set in the 1870s during the passenger pigeon migration, this tale of courage and devotion is not one that will be easily forgotten. 
 What I loved most about this book is that the characters were never wasted. They all felt like real people. In fact, you could easily take this story and transplant it to modern-day with only a few scarce details that would need to be changed, like the fact that passenger pigeons are now extinct. (Which, okay, the stuff about the passenger pigeons was FASCINATING.) The second thing I loved most was that the writing was gorgeous. It was lyrical, aching, honest, and very often laugh-out-loud funny. 
 Georgie Burkhardt is a fantastic heroine. Her spunk is matched only by her foolhardiness, both of which get her into and out of a number of scrapes. Not that I buy into the whole "boy book" and "girl book" phenomenon, but this would be the perfect book to place in the hands of an action-hungry middle school boy (or girl!). Georgie is a crack shot and handily faces off bad guys and cougars, among other threats. Like I said before, this book is super funny, too. Georgie's got a fair amount of snark stored up in her small frame. I wish that this book could be serialized a la Little House on the Prairie, just to get more stories about the residents of Placid, WI. 
 The setup of the plot has quite the hook. Agatha, Georgie's sister, goes missing and is declared dead when a body wearing her dress gets brought back to town. Georgie's need to find out what happened is easily transferred over to the reader, too, which kept me turning pages late into the night when I should have been asleep. My only concern is that I found the resolution regarding Agatha to be a bit lacking in terms of satisfaction, but in the case of One Came Home and other good westerns, the story is more about the journey than the destination. 
 {4.5 stars}