Written by an eight-year-old girl in Kansas, this picture book is just a slice of family history, but the personal account does help make the past accessible for young children. Kate Lied says it is a story about her grandparents, told her by her aunt, and that it is also about the Great Depression and how hard things were.

Her grandfather lost his job, and the bank took away the family house. The family found work for two weeks picking potatoes in Idaho. They lived in tents and worked all day, and they were allowed to pick potatoes for themselves at night; but the work lasted only two weeks, and then they went home again, loaded up with potatoes.

It’s not quite a story, but Ernst’s warm pictures on a brown, grainy background have a childlike simplicity. They are framed like photos in an album and may encourage kids to listen to their own family stories and pass them on.

Jake and Maggy lived on a farm where they loved to sing and dance to the music from Mama’s radio. Then terrible dust storms came and ruined the land. The family had no choice but to auction off the farm and make the long, hard journey west to California-away from the dust storms, where the land is still green.

Along the way, Papa tries to find work, and Jake and Maggy try to help too. But what if Papa can’t find a job? What if California isn’t better after all?

Ann Turner’s dramatic story about the dust bowl, set during the Great Depression and beautifully captured in Robert Barrett’s paintings, shows how one family stays together during difficult times.

From the Inside Flap

Illus. with photographs from the Dust Bowl era. This true story took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ostracized as "dumb Okies," the children of Dust Bowl migrant laborers went without school–until Superintendent Leo Hart and 50 Okie kids built their own school in a nearby field.

As he did for frontier children in his enormously popular Children of the Wild West, Russell Freedman illuminates the lives of the American children affected by the economic and social changes of the Great Depression. Middle-class urban youth, migrant farm laborers, boxcar kids, children whose families found themselves struggling for survival . . . all Depression-era young people faced challenges like unemployed and demoralized parents, inadequate food and shelter, schools they couldn’t attend because they had to go to work, schools that simply closed their doors. Even so, life had its bright spots—like favorite games and radio shows—and many young people remained upbeat and optimistic about the future.

Drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters, and other firsthand accounts, and richly illustrated with classic archival photographs, this book by one of the most celebrated authors of nonfiction for children places the Great Depression in context and shows young readers its human face. Endnotes, selected bibliography, index.