The Ring of a Bell

On a frosty November night in 1872, a warehouse fire, fanned by a chilling breeze, erupts into a conflagration that razes much of Boston's downtown. This sudden catastrophe propels Herb Andersen and his mother, Sally, out of the familiar city and life they knew into an uncertain world. Changing schools as a senior is traumatic for Herb, but his prospects after graduation are even worse. Should he try college or seek a job during the 1873 economic panic? The New York Stock Exchange closes for ten days in the fall of 1873, and one business after another declares bankruptcy. Herb's struggle to define his future sparks his curiosity to learn about the father he has never known. By chance, he meets Alexander Graham Bell and becomes involved with the inventor's effort to create a device to transmit the sound of voice over wire. Sally, too, faces obstacles as she navigates late-nineteenth-century expectations of women as a single mother determinedly working on the right for women to vote. In The Ring of a Bell, Ellen Kingman Fisher weaves together the lives of her characters and their separate quests with true-life individuals and events to create an evocative story of self-discovery and resilience. The story takes place in a time of innovation and invention that brings prosperity for some and poverty for others-the era Mark Twain labeled the Gilded Age.