Excerpt from American Princess by Stephanie Marie Thornton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Can I come too?" I'd asked, but my father had only shaken his head, a rare shaft of sunlight glinting off his spectacles, his gaze not on me but on the craggy mountain in the distance.

"You won't be able to keep up, Sissy."

The truth hurt, for despite being fully recovered, I was still wobbly on uneven ground after spending years in metal leg braces (more like medieval torture devices) to correct a mild bout of childhood polio. He saw my disappointment and sighed. "Perhaps next time."

That's what he always said, but there was never a next time.

When I was six years old, I'd been chastised for trying to walk like Father, mimicking his mix of cowboy-boxer swagger that Mother deemed entirely unladylike. At ten, I'd been reprimanded for trying to talk like him, peppering dee-lighted into every other sentence and grinning in a way no gently bred girl ever should. Now, at seventeen, I'd have hiked to Canada barefoot if it meant spending an afternoon with just him and me.

Instead, it's the same as always, any excuse so my own father doesn't have to spend time with me.

For no matter how Father romped and played with his five other children—Mother's children—I was always the child who carried his first wife's name and blue-gray eyes.

And nothing I did would ever make up for that crime.

"I'll have to ride to find him," the ranger said, wiping the rain from his face before stuffing his mangled hat back onto his head.

"Perhaps you could leave a message?" Mother motioned for one of the maids to check on the children. A real humdinger of a fight seemed to be breaking out between Archie and the rooster.

"I'm afraid not, Mrs. Roosevelt," he said. "For it pertains to President McKinley."

His words threw a sudden chill into the air. Only a week ago, the entire nation had been stunned when an anarchist shot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The wound was a nasty affair—as I suppose it always is when a man is shot twice in the abdomen at point-blank range—but McKinley seemed to improve after a gynecologist found on the fairgrounds performed emergency surgery to remove the first bullet. The president rallied so much that my father, America's vice president, had insisted that we keep our scheduled trip here in the Adirondacks.

A little chaos was no match for my father's well-laid plans, not when there were mountains to conquer, rivers to ford, and wild game to shoot. Plus, Father had no desire to seem as if he were hovering over the president, waiting for him to die even as the newspapers and a constant stream of telegrams reported that McKinley had been growing sicker over the past days. Mother's fingers fluttered to her mouth, as if to trap the impertinent question on her lips.

I, however, had no such qualms. Perhaps it seemed callous, as if I had no pity for the dying McKinley, and I did feel a pang of grief for him, but I could feel the surge of history in the making, beating in my blood and carrying me with it.

"Is the president dead?" My feet were firmly on the floor as I leaned forward in my chair, all thoughts of tonight's party forgotten as Mother came to stand beside me.

The ranger shook his head in a manner almost reverential.

"Not dead," he answered. "Dying of blood poisoning. They say he won't last the night."

Mother clutched my hand as the ranger tipped his hat to us and mounted his sorrel horse, kicking the animal's ribs and tearing off in the direction of Mount Marcy, to fetch my father back to Buffalo in case he suddenly became the most important man in America.

"Lord help us." Mother crushed my palm as if a handful of my bone fragments would give her strength. I extricated myself and left her in the hall.

"What's happening, Sissy?" My little sister Ethel poked her head out of the room we shared, her blond hair parted after a fresh bath following her camping trip and combed to gleaming perfection around her ten-year-old face. Skip, our feisty rat terrier, yipped at my feet, but for once I ignored him.

Excerpted from American Princess by Stephanie Thornton. Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Thornton. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.