want to start a newspaper in little Groton? When fifteen-year-old Livy chanced to meet them on the road near her home, they seemed an answer to her dream. She had just graduated from the one-room school house and hoped to go to secondary school at Newbury Seminary, and she needed money. If these were newspapermen, they'd need news. Writing things down was easier for her than talking, and with a houseful of sisters, she would know all the town's news. She blushed at her own forwardness in asking them if she could be a reporter for their paper. She had no idea of the dangerous future she was bargaining herself into. The Printer's Devil plays on several well-wrought levels; the mystery of the newspapermen and their interest in a storied tunnel; the harsh reality of what happens in wartime to a farming town when sons go off to war and the old folks cannot keep up the farm, when girls take over manly chores and how their lives are impacted, and the effects of the Missouri Compromise of 1861. Livy manages to get herself in an envelope of danger. She determines to rescue the child slave Solomon, whom she believes the newspapermen are holding captive. She screws up her courage to investigate the existence of the legendary tunnel under the Peter Paul house where the 'newspapermen' have set up shop. And she loses her Yankee heart to Jem, who turns out to be an officer in the Confederate army looking for a stash of excellent counterfeit money, plates and diesmade by the infamous Bristol Bill and his gang. This money and the ability to print more of it would enable the Confederates to buy arms, food, uniforms and army supplies, or to print a flood of fake bills and make inflation worse in the North, or to purchase gold and trade with European countries sympathetic to the South. Livy grows up fast and clarifies her own values in this Civil War story.  (less)