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...

Abandoned by her father after Black Tuesday, thirteen-year-old Bea convinces Mrs. Scott to take in her and her sister in exchange for farm work and Bea bonds with a seemingly untrainable horse.

In 1933, facing the hardships of the Great Depression, Ruth learns to follow her mother's example and count her lucky stars when she turns her disappointment over not being able to attend fourth grade into a blessing for her younger sister.

Ten-year-old Beans Curry, a member of the Keepsies, the best marble playing gang in Depression-era Key West, Florida, engages in various schemes to earn money while "New Dealers" from Washington, D.C., arrive to turn run down Key West into a tourist resort.

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...

Junia, a dedicated mule with an important job, assists in delivering books and reading material to people in the Kentucky hills and woods during the Great Depression.

In 1932, during the Depression in Ohio, thirteen-year-old Rudy, determined to help his family weather the hard times, hops a train going west to California and experiences the hobo life.

When ten-year-old Margar©Ưta Sandoval's family moves to Wyoming during the Great Depression, she faces racism, homesickness, and the possibility that her grandmother's land in New Mexico may be lost.--

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.