Murderers, mob bosses, and convicts-- these guys are not your average neighbors. Unless you live on Alcatraz. It’s 1935 and twelve-year-old Moose Flanagan and his family have just moved to the infamous island so his father can work as a prison guard. Now Moose has to try to fit in at his new school, avoid getting caught up in one of the warden’s daughter’s countless plots, and keep an eye on his autistic sister Natalie. All Moose wants to do is protect Natalie, live up to his parents’ expectations, and stay out of trouble. But on Alcatraz, trouble is never very far away.  (M,J)

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.  (M)

At any other time in the Australian town of Broome, Mitsy Sennosuke would be accepted as a welcome member of the noisy, multi-ethnic community, but in the dark days just before World War II, Mitsy, a Japanese-Australian girl, is anything but accepted, except by Hart Penrose, Mitsy's best friend's brother, who is in love with her.  (S)

In a series of poems, 15 year-old Billie Joe relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.  (M,J)

Chicago-bred Mary Alice has been sentenced to a year-long stay in rural Illinois with her irrepressible, rough and gruff grandmother. Soon, however, she becomes Grandma's partner in crime, helping to carry out madcap schemes to benefit friends and avenge enemies.  (M,J)

Eleven-year-old April Sloane has never set foot in a school before, and now that President Hoover is building a one-room schoolhouse in the hollow of the Blue Ridge Mountains where April lives, she is eager to attend it. But these are the Depression years, and Mama, who has been grieving ever since the accidental death of her seven-year-old son, wants April to stay home and do the chores. With her grandmother's intercession, April is grudgingly allowed to go, and finds a new world opening up to her. But at home, April struggles to repair the relationship with her mother.  (M)

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth in Mexico for the 1930s labor camps of the San Joaquin Valley, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers. (M,J)

When Abram Harsich comes to Horshoe, a dust bowl farm town in Saskatchewan, with his Mirror of All Things and grand plans for a rain machine, the mesmerized residents forget their troubles --and their children who are mysteriously disappearing. Among the missing and quickly forgotten is seven-year-old Matthew. Only Matthew’s older brother Robert seems to be able to resist Abram’s spell, and to discover what happened to Matthew and the others.  (M,J,S)

Why is the land so important to Cassie's family? It takes the events of one turbulent year--the year of the night riders and the burnings, the year a white girl humiliates Cassie in public simply because she is black--to show Cassie that having a place of their own is the Logan family's lifeblood. It is the land that gives the Logans their courage and pride, for no matter how others may degrade them, the Logans possess something no one can take away.  (M,J)