Geraldine Kaye (1925–2010)

I'm not sure if the strategies Kelso used could work outside a story, but there's actually no magic involved, so maybe? I think children of the target audience will like this advanced leveled reader more than jaded old me. Do note that it's from the UK, so kids from the US might need help with some vocabulary. I enjoyed the copy that is archived on openlibrary.org.

Polly and Tom live in the turnpike cottage – their father Peg-leg keeps the toll-gate. Their mother ¡s dead and their father gees too much to the alehouse. Their life is harsh and both children dream of escape to something better — Tom of going to sea and Polly of service at the great-house. Hasn’t Miss Annabel, a girl of her own age, promised her? But the great-house is shut up now. Into their lives come the Gypsy band, who contrive, through their manipulation of the villager’s show more Ignorance, to settle down on the lawns of the great-house itself. And into Polly’s life particularly comes É preoccupied with the problem of his own longed-for acceptance as a true Romany.
A marvellous story, true for any century, of the clash between different lives, of problems that can’t be solved by dreams but that may be transformed by this very clash — a story whose details remain in the memory. show less