Posts tagged with: poverty

The Castaways by Rob Vollmar

It is the height of the Depression, and thirteen-year-old Tucker Freeman’s father is gone for good. To survive, he and his family move in with the Widow, his father’s humorless and ultra-religious older sister. Convinced by the Widow that he isn’t pulling his weight on her farm, she hands him fifteen cents and tells him …read more…

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Update as of 26 October 2011: This book continues to be controversial. Only this past spring, I was asked to help fight a push to not just remove this book from the twelfth grade curriculum of a public high school, but to remove the book from the school library, as well. The irony is that …read more…

By the River by Steven Herrick

The year is 1962, and fourteen-year-old Harry Hodby lives in a small town in Australia. His mother died when he was seven, his friend (and potential girlfriend) Linda was swept away in a flood, and he, along with his father and younger brother Keith, are left to sort out their hardscrabble lives, coping with poverty, …read more…