How much historical fact should be included in a work of historical fiction? This is the question that kept occurring to me as I read these pages. Maybe it is unfortunate for the authors that I volunteered to read and to review their newest book. I chose it because I was curious to see how a woman in the 1930s would temporarily turn hobo and would run the risk of jumping into freight cars. It's just the luck of the draw that the action is set in a region that I know well, in a place where I live and travel around every day. And in a place where I have done a lot of historical railroad research myself.

It is June 1936. Bertie Patchet has just graduated with a teaching degree from Central Connecticut State Normal School. The trouble is, she doesn't know if she will land an elementary school teaching job for the fall. She's done with college, she has little money and she doesn't have a home to go back to. What should she do? She knows that some men ride freight trains for free in order to find work in other cities. Soon enough, she falls into this outlier community herself, disguising herself as a young boy and picking up occasional odd jobs.

Can she survive for a couple of months by living this way? Especially without being found out as a woman?

Over the next couple of months, Bertie rides the freight rails from New Haven, Connecticut, to Providence and to Boston, to parts of central and western Massachusetts, and eventually back to New Haven. Along the way, she meets several fellow hobos. Some are helpful, and others are not. As the title suggests, she experiences a series of adventures. Some are good or interesting, and others are not. Watch out, reader, when the story reaches the end of any chapter, for this is where threats and dangers lurk. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger that Bertie must resolve in the first paragraph of the next chapter. She sure faces a lot of problems on a regular basis.

In the beginning pages, the authors note that these characters are fictional. They also tell us that "a few locations have been altered to accommodate the story." They don't offer further explanation. But to those of us who know the region's roads and rail lines, these alterations seem to be odd and unnecessary. Historical facts are also altered. For example: When Bertie and a companion arrive at the station in Athol, Massachusetts, they see a sign that the building is the "Property of the Plymouth Railroad Co." Well, this would be a nifty trick. More than 100 miles separate the towns of Athol and Plymouth. No direct rail line ever connected the two. And no railroad company ever existed with this name. The sign should have instead correctly attributed the rail line to the Boston & Maine Railroad. Was this a fictionalization of convenience? The authors could have learned the identity of the company in one of two books: Steelways of New England (by Alvin F. Harlow, Creative Age Press, 1946), or The Rail Lines of Southern New England: A Handbook of Railroad History (by Ronald Dale Karr, Branch Line Press, 1995). Both would have provided invaluable background reference for their story. A few other geographical alterations bothered me too, and I'll let them go undocumented here. I believe that additional research could have improved the historical facts of the setting.

In Chapter 29 and in the Epilogue, the authors provide updates about the lives of the fictional characters, and what happens to them after the main story comes to an end. This would have been the perfect place to also explain what facts were altered for the sake of the story, and to reveal what was geographically and historically true and what was not.

To the everyday reader who is unfamiliar with the terrain of southern New England, this story may provide average entertainment. Is it believable? This is a question that only the individual readers can answer for themselves. For me, the constant threats of danger at the end of each chapter and the fudging around with local geography had me shaking my head. I think improvements could have been made while working within the framework of the historical fiction genre.