“The Earth Dragon Awakes,” by Laurence Yep (HarperCollins, 128 pages, $14.99)
An Anglo boy, Henry, and his friend, Chin, alternatively chronicle the effects of the earthquake that shattered San Francisco 100 years ago this month.
Henry’s privileged parents employ Chin’s father as a houseboy, and the two youths strike up a friendship. Their accounts of the April 18, 1906, earthquake illustrate the ways that the earthquake temporarily leveled the city’s social caste along with its buildings.
Through the boys’ eyes, Yep shows how this event gripped the country with the same urgency as last summer’s Hurricane Katrina. More than 3,000 died, and 300,000 more were left homeless in the earthquake. Yep also gives readers a hint of the energetic aftermath that revitalized a devastated city, a history lesson recommended to those charged with rebuilding New Orleans. Ages 9-12.
“Escaping Into the Night,” by D. Dina Friedman (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 208 pages, $15.95)
Friedman’s eloquent debut novel illuminates an obscure aspect of history: the subterranean forest camps where several thousand Jews and other targets hid from the Nazis.
In this story, a Jewish girl, Halina, slips away from the Nazis herding Jews from Poland’s Nowogrodek ghetto into mass executions nearby. From Batya, another child who escapes, Halina learns of her own mother’s death: She was shot at the edge of a pit.
Halina marvels at Batya’s steadfast faith in God despite grim hardships and horrific abuse visited upon the girls and another refugee, Reuven. Friedman pulls no punches in this fiercely honest account of survival, including the inner-camp fights between refugees. Ages 9-15.
“I’m Still Scared: The War Years,” by Tomie dePaola (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 83 pages, $13.99)
The latest in dePaola’s autobiographical series about his boyhood begins with the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Already scared by the news, Tomie, now in second grade, becomes even more apprehensive observing the whispering adults around him, and classmates accuse him, with his Italian surname, of being sympathetic to the enemy.
Threads of normalcy lace Tomie’s new wartime life. He still attends dancing lessons and sees new movies, including “Dumbo” (“excellent although Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo’s mother, goes to jail,” Tomie remarks). But the levity of watching “Mr. Bug Goes to Town” diminishes when a newsreel shows London turning to rubble during the Blitz. Ages 9-12.
“Counting on Grace,” by Elizabeth Winthrop (Random House/Wendy Lamb Books, 230 pages, $15.95
With mixed feelings, 12-year-old Grace trades her textbooks for a textile-mill job in 1910. She’s anxious to help her French-Canadian family, financially pinched in their new Vermont home, but reluctant to leave school after discovering her teacher considers her an exceptional student.
Grace’s parents install her as a doffer, supervising and changing the bobbins on the spinning frames her mother runs. Already, it’s an abrupt lesson in Math in Real Life. Grace’s mother has six frames. Each frame has 12 sides. Each side has 136 bobbins. When a bobbin is bare, Grace whips it out and installs a full one – a hard job for a left-handed girl.
Winthrop tells the story from Grace’s vantage point, a clear-eyed and pitiless view of a time when parents “didn’t count on (children) living past the age of 10,” and few child labor laws were enforced. Ages 9-12.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
