Born and Bred in the Great Depression by Jonah Winter - ADVISABLE

Winter, Jonah Born and Bred in the Great Depression. Kimberly Bulcken Root PICTURE BOOK  Schwartz and wade books, 2011.  $17.99 Content: G.  This book is a retelling of the highlights of the Great Depression told by a son after listening to a lifetime of his father’s stories.  Excellent illustrations capture the time period when men looked for jobs so they could take care of their families, when women worked with what they were given to make it last, and the simplicity of a country life.  This book is a synopsis of this family’s experience with the depression and I enjoyed the wonderment and adoration you could tell the author had for his ancestors.  EL and MS-ADVISABLE.  Reviewer, C. Peterson.

A Diamond in the Desert by Kathryn Fitzmaurice - OPTIONAL

Fitzmaurice, Kathryn A Diamond in the Desert, 256 p. Viking (Penguin), FEBRUARY 2012.  Tetsu and his family have sent to an internment camp in the middle of the Arizona desert because they are Japanese.  And during WWII, that is not good.  Tetsu, his mother and his little sister wait anxiously for word of their father, who was taken somewhere else by the American government.  And waiting is about all there is to do in the middle of nowhere, with little money and no access to services – except baseball.  Tetsu and his friends find solace in practice and play and learn to confront the new hand life has dealt them.  I think Yoshiko Uchida’s books are still the definitive elementary level historical fiction about the internment camps and Thin Wood Walls by David Patneude is my favorite middle or high school version.  This one lacks the heart of the others – the short, choppy chapters break up the narrative in odd little chunks instead of allowing the reader to immerse themselves into the story.  EL, MS – OPTIONAL. Cindy, Library Teacher