The Mud and the Machinery

About this book

In 1888, the French Panama Canal project is a grand ambition drowning in rain, yellow fever, and bureaucratic deceit. Twelve-year-old Ida Bell, a sharp-tongued Barbadian girl, arrives in Colón with her father, expecting a new life built on steady wages. Instead, she finds a chaotic company town where death is as common as the mud. When her father falls ill not with fever, but with exhaustion and despair, Ida takes a job as a runner for a reclusive French cartographer. As she navigates the perilous trenches of the Culebra Cut and the segregated wards of the hospital, she uncovers a discrepancy in the company's mortality ledgers—thousands of unnamed workers are being erased from history to keep investors in Paris happy. Armed only with her wit and a stolen ledger, Ida must expose the truth before the jungle, or the company men, swallow her whole.