Beggar Charlie, by Madeleine McLaughlin, a Tween adventure available from MuseItUp publishing is a short story set in a time frame when children were not cherished, and life is not all that valued.

Orphaned when he woke to find his mother had died beside him somewhere throughout the night, Charlie is sold into the sailing life under Captain Butler, a man who keeps him close against the river rats that would set upon the boy without a second thought. Living at sea is a brutal life under the best of times, but when you are barely as high as a knee cap and you’re grieving your mother, it can be terrifying.

Captain Butler sails them to China, gifts him and the next oldest boy Hickory Dick the first shore time…but the China shores are in unrest and the people, many of them addicted to the vagaries of Opium, angry.

Walking the streets of this strange land where people speak “China-talk” they find a native lad Tang who invites the boys to his father’s house for some hospitality. What they find will bring three lads together to brave the world as they seek refuge somewhere for them to live out their childhoods together.

Leaving the house of violent death, Tang now a part of their little unit watch the captain tossed overboard and the ship…sink.

The three boys set off, watching each other’s back heading for Tang’s aunt in Shanghai and the hope of a future three boys can share and find comfort in.

Family, they learn, can come from those not attached to you by blood. Some comes through shared experience, shared concern for making it through times no longer anything remotely like what they expected.

This is a beautiful, touching story about courage in the face of terrible necessity, and opening your heart, soul, and beliefs to those who might be strangers but are more important to you now that you have survived so much, than the very breath you breathe.

This is a powerful short story I cannot recommend highly enough.

In a time where we look at others and call them names because we have nothing important to otherwise focus our inner powers on, I found this a story that any and every teacher should make required reading.

Well Done, Ms. McLaughlin

FIVE STARS easily..wish I could give it more.

Read an Excerpt