Barb's book picks for January -- Autumn Street by Lois Lowry

Teaching Pre K-8, Jan 1996 by Kines, Barbara

Intermediate: During this period of commemorations of World War II, older children have particularly fine opportunities to understand history as it may have affected some people they know perhaps their grandparents, for example.

But in order to make an historical event real to them, it helps to understand how events affected people their age and the daily life of families and neighborhoods.

In Autumn Street, (Dell, 1980) Lois Lowry recreates the war years in a small town so authentically that the reader feels he must have walked down those same streets in the past.

Themes of friendship, social position, racial implication and family love and support are woven together to tell a story that only an author of Lowry's excellence could conceive.