Last Updated on April 6, 2016
Edinboro, Pennsylvania is known for its long winter, deep snow and good maple sugaring seasons. While living in Edinboro from 1952 through the summer of 1958, Virginia Sorensen wrote the wonderful children’s book Miracles on Maple Hill, a Newbery Award winner. Virginia loved living in Edinboro and commented in one newspaper article that she wanted to stay here forever.
In Miracles on Maple Hill, Virginia Sorensen writes of spring, family, love, sugaring, and of the miracles Marly discovers each spring: the first sap run and the beauty of nature. Most importantly, she writes of the miracles that Marly hoped might happen to her father who had been a soldier and a prisoner of war. He returned home to the family, a tired and broken man. Marly held on to the hope that miracles would not just happen in the sugarbush, but in his heart.
For anyone who has been to a sweet, steamy sugarhouse, felt the coming of spring in a sugarbush, tasted first run syrup, or has been moved by the sheer awe of the Northwest Pennsylvania seasons and woods, reading Miracles on Maple Hill captures what Virginia Sorensen knew and experienced.
More information about Virginia Sorensen is available from the following resources:
- Video tribute to Virginia Sorensen – produced for her nomination to the Erie Hall of Fame.
- Virginia Sorensen’s acceptance speech – for the 1956 Newbery Medal.
- My Friend Virginia Sorensen – article by Anna Marie Smith, published in The Horn Book Magazine, August 1957
- Wikipedia entry for Virginia Sorensen
