WALKING ON AIR
Kelly Easton
Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster
Fiction
ISBN: 0689848757
233 pages

Travel back to the time of the Great Depression with 12-year-old June and her family. Her father is a preacher, and a highlight of his traveling tent show is June's tightrope act. She can twirl, flip and amaze crowds. But fewer and fewer people can part with money in these hard times, and her parents are tense and stretched to the limit in every way. They make a wrong turn in Detroit, where her father is imprisoned for five months.

While they wait for him to be released, June is allowed to go to school and live in a house with her mother and Rhett, a longtime friend of her mother's. She actually has friends and a teacher she likes. Her mother finds a job, and June relaxes into this life with a newfound sense of security.

But then her father is released, and all he wants to do is return to the tent shows. When her mother becomes ill and hospitalized, June knows it's decision time. And where is Rhett? He has always turned up to help them through bad times in the past. Who is he really?

June must choose what is right for her in the presence of the three confused adults who make up her family. Where does she belong?

The setting of the desperate 1930s richly comes alive in this moving novel. June's struggle to find herself is applicable to young people in any time, but the struggle to survive in the Depression brings it into sharp focus.

   --- Reviewed by Amy Alessio

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