Akron Public Library

To Janey Larkin, the blue willow plate was the most beautiful thing in her life, a symbol of the home she could only dimly remember. Now that her father was an itinerant worker, Janey didn't have a home she could call her own or any real friends, as her family had to keep moving, following the crops from farm to farm. Someday, Janey promised the willow plate, with its picture of a stream and a bridge and a real house beyond, her family would once...

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy,and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lenny dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own - a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come...

The common theme of nuclear disaster and human vulnerability interweaves the lives of four young people, an Ojibway Indian, an illegal Mexican migrant worker, a rock musician, and a sheep rancher's daughter, with the lives of three veterans of past wars.

A twelve-year-old Mexican crosses the border illegally to join his father in California.

Tired of moving around so much, Amelia, the daughter of migrant farm workers, dreams of a stable home.

When her blind dog slips his collar, twelve-year old Lily meets Salma Santiago, a young Hispanic girl whose migrant family are in Maine for the blueberry-picking season, and, based partly on their mutual love of dogs, the two forge a friendship while painting bee boxes for Lily's grandfather--but as the Blueberry Queen pageant approaches Lily and Selma are confronted with some of the hard truths of prejudice and migrant life.

A young black girl relates the daily events of her family's migrant life in the cotton fields of central California.

A story presented in English and Spanish in which a boy named Panchito worries that he will not get the gift he has been hoping for when his family has to move a few days before Christmas to find work.

"When two Depression-era migrant workers, Paul and Vern, find an abandoned baby in the woods, they take it upon themselves to care for the mysterious child. When fifteen-year-old Marigold, reviled by her family after an unwanted pregnancy, loses her baby in the forest, her whole world is painted black. She's still fraught with despair when she discovers what seems to be a miraculous power within her. Coot, a child preacher on the Kansas plains, escapes...

"Dust Bowl refugee Gloria Mae Willard finds herself uprooted and working on a California peach orchard, where she tries to join the secret, all-boys baseball team that she's desperate to play on"--