BEFORE PARADISE

It’s 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, and ten-year-old Beans Curry has had enough of working for close-fisted hoodwinkers. With an eye towards enterprise, he and his eight-year-old brother, Kermit, have been taking on odd jobs around town to help their unemployed parents make ends meet in a time when everyone is struggling.

Like everyone else in the close-knit community of Key West, Florida, Beans isn’t ready to trust the stranger in a shiny automobile from Washington D.C. with New Deal aspirations to turn the island into a tourist destination. Why would people want to travel across the country just to vacation in a town full of dilapidated homes, overflowing garbage, pot-holed dirt roads, and swarms of scraggly children? And besides, how can you trust a guy who walks around town in his underwear? Bermuda shorts, he says? — Beans doesn’t think so.

When a local bootlegger offers Beans a tidy sum to create a distraction, Beans seizes the opportunity to help his family. But after tragedy strikes as a consequence of his actions and the community mistakenly lauds him as a hero, Beans decides he will do anything to repay their trust. Saving Key West will be his biggest enterprise yet.

Jennifer Holm’s middle grade novel Full of Beans is a heartfelt and humorous prequel to her 2011 Newbery Honor Book Turtle in Paradise. The author’s note includes additional information on the background of Key West and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which ultimately saved the bankrupt town and shaped its history as a present-day tourism hotspot.

Grades 4+

TURTLE IN PARADISE

Turtle is an eleven-year-old girl sent to Key West, Florida by her mother in the 1930s. When her mom gets a job as a housekeeper with an employer that can’t stand children, Turtle comes to live with her mother’s sister Aunt Minnie and three boy cousins none of whom she has ever met before. Florida is a very strange place for Turtle, much different from any place she’s lived before. It’s hot, everyone is called by a nickname, no one wear shoes and the food is strange. Her cousins have created a gang called The Diaper Gang, a “no-girls allowed club” that help them earning a bit of extra cash babysitting infants. Her adventures with the gang of cousins help her to discover family secrets. This nice and humorous adventure story was inspired by the author’s great grandmother stories that emigrated from the Bahamas to Key West in 1897. Written by Jennifer L. Holm. Ages 9-12

FIESTY FEMALES AND WEARY TRAVELERS

The Great Depression was a time when hardly anyone had any money. It was so bad in parts of the country, people would travel from town to town hoping to find something that would give them money to eat. While the strain was obvious to many of the kids, life went on, and accidents still happened. Mary Bayliss was said to be a miracle after she survived a horrible accident - one that her brother, Leo, did not survive. This story has a little bit about history, a little bit about family, a lot about dealing with the loss of someone you love. LEO AND THE LESSER LION by Sandra Forrester is a really good book. It's not too heavy on the history, and really shows how some things in life are just timeless. For 5th - 8th grades.