• Age: 8 to 14
• Grade: 3 to 8
• Reading age: 8 to 14

Kitty Byles is an 11-year-old adventurer, and she has a Great Plan. She's decided to find Tommy, her uncle but more like an older brother to her. Tommy has been outcast from the family ever since he joined up with other Yankee rebels to figt for independence from British rule.
Kitty and her family fled Boston in 1776 and went as refugees to Halifax. Now she's going back. With her hair cut short and tucked under her cap, she starts her journey as a cabin boy on a schooner sailing out of Halifax. Her adventures take her to Boston, then to the rebel army camp outside New York.
There she finds Tommy, and she meets Abraham - an adventurer like herself, fleeing from a slaveowner and searching for his family who have escaped to Nova Scotia. Together Kitty and Abraham come up with a second Great Plan...
From the historical events of the American Revolution and the diaries of a Nova Scotia family which recount their experiences during these turbulent times, novelist Donna Smyth has crafted this fictional story of Kitty Byles.

Donna Smyth lives on an old farm in Hants County, Nova Scotia. In addition to numerous short stories, poems and non-fiction pieces, Smyth has published two novels, Quilt and Subversive Elements, and a young adult novel, Loyalist Runaway, which won the 1992 Dartmouth Fiction Award. Her previous plays include Giant Anna and an adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Donna Smyth's profile page