Poppy at Summerhill by Gabrielle Wang

Ill. by Lucia Masciullo. Our Australian Girl (series). Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978 0 14 330533 0.
(Ages: 9+) Australian history. After Poppy runs away from the mission, she falls into life at Summerhill, a station where Aboriginal stockman Tom, has a fair idea of just who she is in her boy's disguise. He helps her as she catches her ankle in a dingo trap and taking her back to the station, nurses her back to health, all the while teaching her some of the bush crafts and lore of the local Aboriginal people. At the station she is befriended by a young girl of her own age, Noni, but her brother Joe is very suspicious and bullying in his behaviour towards her. Poppy is a lively, fascinating character, as are the others she meets in this story, and although credulity is a little stretched and the incidents do pile one on top of the other, it is eminently readable and will be highly appealing to the middle primary audience it is aimed at.
This is the second in the quartet about Poppy, a girl living in the gold rush era of Australia, with factual information at the end of the book along with a teaser leading the readers to the next in the series of four, part of the Our Australian Girl series.
Fran Knight