The Ballad of Lucy Whipple by Karen Cushman. Fiction. 47 editions published between 1953 and 2019 in 6 languages.

In 1849, a twelve-year-girl who calls herself Lucy is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a small California mining town, where Lucy helps run a rough boarding house and looks for comfort in books while trying to find a way to get "home."