A black family living in Mississippi during the Depression of the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination which its children do not understand.

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past. Over the summer she pieces together his story. Having heard stories about Manifest, Abilene is disappointed to find that it's just a dried-up, worn-out old town. But her disappointment quickly turns to excitement when she discovers...

With love and determination befitting the "world's greatest family," twelve-year-old Deza Malone, her older brother Jimmie, and their parents endure tough times in Gary, Indiana, and later Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression.

Frankie and her sister, Toni, are abandoned alongside so many other orphans--two young, unwanted women doing everything they can to survive. As the embers of the Great Depression are kindled into the fires of World War II, and injustice, poverty, and death walk the streets, it is up to Frankie to find something worth holding on to in the ruins of this shattered America.

"It's 1932, and twelve-year-old Cal Black and his pop have been riding the rails for a year after losing their farm in the Great Depression. Cal likes being a "knight of the road" with Pop, even if they're broke. But then Pop has to go to Washington, D.C.--and Cal can't go with him. So Pop tells Cal something he never knew before: He's a Creek Indian, which means Cal is, too. And Pop has decided to send Cal to Challagi Indian School, a government...

In 1934, eleven-year-old Terpsichore's father signs up for President Roosevelt's Palmer Colony project, uprooting the family from Wisconsin to become pioneers in Alaska, where Terpsichore refuses to let rough conditions and first impressions get in the way of her grand adventure.

From the Newbery Award-winning author of Across Five Aprils and Up a Road Slowly comes a tale of a brave young man’s struggle to find his own strength during the Great Depression.
“A powerfully moving story.”—Chicago Daily News
In 1932, American's dreams were simple: a job, food to eat, a place to sleep, and shoes without holes. But for millions of people these simple needs were nothing...