Boston Jane

Boston Jane: An Adventure is a children's historical novel by Jennifer L. Holm, published in 2001 and followed by Boston Jane: Wilderness Days and Boston Jane: The Claim. The name belongs to the main character, Jane Peck, and the Chinook give it to her because the first Americans they dealt with came from Boston.

Jane is sixteen when she sails from Philadelphia to Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory to meet William Baldt, her betrothed. She travels on a ship with the unfortunate name Lady Luck, accompanied by her Irish maid Mary, who dies during a storm on the way, and by a French Catholic priest hoping to baptise people in the area and a sailor from Boston.

The book moves between the voyage and Jane's earlier life in Philadelphia, where she had been a wild child before she was sent to Miss Hepplewhite's Academy for Young Ladies and remade into a quiet and pious young woman. That training is of very little use on the frontier, and the novel follows her attempt to keep hold of it while the country she has arrived in takes no interest in it at all.