Conan Putnam, Independent Writing and Editing Professional, Reviewer for Chicago-Tribune had this to say about "The Twelve O'Clock Bus."


The Twelve O’Clock Bus tells the story of Zara, a foster child with a mysterious past growing up in rural Connecticut during the Great Depression. In vivid, thrillingly descriptive prose, Adrienne Wolfert seeks to evoke the mysteries of real life as she draws an authentic portrait of a bright, hard-working young girl struggling to find the answer to a burning question: How do you find out who you are when the past is hidden from view?
In the novel’s first section, seven-year-old Zara, lost in a snowstorm on the way home from school in the winter of 1932, experiences a moment of revelation that sets the novel’s central theme of self-discovery in motion. Stepping off the school bus into the blinding storm, she looks around for Toddy, the hired man who usually accompanies her on the two-mile walk to the dairy farm where she lives with her foster parents, Ma and Pa Baron. He’s not there. Clutching her copy of Little Women, Zara sets off on her own and is soon nearly buried in the icy drifts: “The world was a thick white Arctic, broken only by the hunched backs of bushes…She tried turning back, but which way was back?” Scared and alone, Zara’s thoughts instinctively turn to the Mama she never knew. Picturing a pair of huge, snowy wings closing over her, she’s on the edge of giving up when suddenly, out of the rushing wind comes Toddy at last, plucking her out of the drift.
“Hold on, girlie,” he shouts as he hoists her half-frozen body over his shoulder. “Don’t go to sleep.”
At the farmhouse, Ma and Pa Baron revive Zara with soup and a roaring fire. This rare experience of true affection and belonging leaves her with a feeling of specialness. She knows that she has changed. She feels like a bird about to take off and fly, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t shake the empty feeling of having fallen from the nest.
“What was the good of those wings if she never would fly?” she asks herself. “Of all this wanting if she would never find Mama? If Mama didn’t find her?”
The novel’s momentum comes from the beautifully detailed scenes and vividly drawn characters that Zara encounters on her painful but ultimately satisfying journey of self-discovery. When Ma Baron dies, 13-year-old Zara is sent to live with the Greco family on the rocky, uncultivated flats of their pig farm. “No use pretending I’m your Ma, ‘cause I ain’t,” Sally Greco tells Zara. A poor housekeeper who earns extra money taking in newborn babies not yet put up for adoption, Sally turns out to be an important link to Zara’s past. And Sally’s brother, Sparky Johnson, a mover and shaker in local politics with an eye for a pretty girl, plays a key role when the time comes for Zara to demand answers as she pieces together the puzzle of who she is and why Sparky wants to recruit her to work on the campaign to elect a new governor.
The realities of the diminished circumstances so many Americans faced during The Great Depression were especially severe in the rural areas that comprise the setting of this novel. As Wolfert makes clear, country people were no strangers to blackout curtains, rationing and food and gas shortages. Little luxuries like Tangee lipstick, Muguet de Bois cologne, Burma Shave lotion and Lifebuoy soap became poignant reminders of the dancing, dates and fun that awaited when hard times and the war were finally over.
There is so much to like in this coming-of-age novel, not least its powerful depiction of the bright and dark sides of the lives of girls and women at a time in history when their choices outside the domestic sphere were severely limited. Zara’s story, full of drama and surprise, is a striking example of Wolfert’s remarkable talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.