In 1910, a 12-year-old Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side spends two weeks with a Vermont family through the Fresh Air Fund. Dossi, short for Hadassah, lives in a tenement room with her older sister and knows only the sights and smells of her crowded community. She takes two library books with her on the long train journey to help dispel her fears, but finds that her sponsors are warm and sharing people. Each experience on the Meades' farm is new for Dossi: the size of cows, the wonder of fireflies in the night, and the quantity of food on the table. There are mild cultural differences. The Vermonters have never seen a Jew and Dossi, although non-observant, will not eat pork or mix meat and milk products. Still, she becomes friends with the two girls in the family and helps to save a neighbor's livestock when a barn catches fire. Told through Dossi's journal entries, this pleasant story is sometimes marred by stilted conversation. However, it has a happy ending and the added interest of an actual historical person, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, who first photographed snowflakes.ASusan Pine, New York Public Library Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.