Comfort Read #1

Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift, Kathryn Lasky

This is the only one of my comfort Christmas reads that I didn't read first as a child. This book came out in 2001, as part of the "Dear America" series. I picked it up because (a) my parents lived through and told me about the Great Depression and (b) it was written by Kathryn Lasky, whose Callista Jacobs mysteries I already liked (also her young adult book Prank).

The book is set in 1932, during which the Depression is already affecting the middle-class Swift family: Sam and Belle and their four daughters Clementine, Gwendolyn, Adelaide (Lady), and our protagonist, 11-year-old Minnie, and one son, Ozzie, a precocious 9-year-old who's a science nerd. As the book opens, the daughter of one of Belle's cousins, Willie Faye Darling, who's grown up in the Dust Bowl, is shipped to live with them because her parents are dead. The story follows the family's adjustments, as well as Willie Faye's, and the worsening conditions of the Depression on them all, especially after Sam Swift loses his job as an accountant.

Minnie is a fun narrator. She's opinionated and very independent, an admirer of Amelia Earhart, and a lover of writing. Willie Faye is also a fascinating character: brought up in Texas during the terrible droughts, she is undersized, but with an understanding far beyond her years. Probably the most fun character is Lady, the offbeat, clothes-loving sixteen year old who can do just about anything with fashion, including almost literally "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Based on author Lasky's aunts and uncle, the characters crackle to life under Minnie's pen. The only sour note is the traditional epilogue (all "Dear America" books had them, telling what happened to the protagonists as adults), which, I thought, went a little overboard in suddenly making the Swifts "fabulously wealthy." I would have settled for them just living a normal, middle-class life.