By Piranha T.

Francie knows there are other worlds besides the one she’s grown up in. Like the big city over the river, where children don’t have to scavenge the streets to find trash to sell to the local junkman, and people have enough to eat. But what would it even be like to live there? All she’s ever known is life on the streets, where her hardworking mother can barely make enough to support her family: Francie, her mother, her younger brother Neely, and their occasionally working father, widely acknowledged as an alcoholic. The world beyond the ragged streets of Brooklyn is unreachable to Francie and the others who live in New York’s slums.

Francie dreams of visiting the city, although she knows it is impossible. There is little hope of leaving Brooklyn, even as her family gathers pennies in a milk can, imagining gathering a whole fifty dollars to buy their own land. She has a hard life, but she accepts it. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of how she grows up, overcoming hardships, finding work, learning the ways of that world and the one outside Brooklyn, too.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a partially autobiographical account of the author’s life in Brooklyn, New York just after the turn of the twentieth century. It is an amazing, compelling, and beautiful story. I don’t often prefer historical fiction, but this book was unusual; instead of focusing on the times themselves, it highlighted what happened in them. Although outside events were mentioned, this is a personal story, one of the rare books which makes you feel like the character and live her world as she would have a hundred years ago. Francie is a strong and sympathetic protagonist. This book makes you not just love it, but feel it, too. It is one of those classics which has stood the test of time, remaining accessible and real to the modern reader. I would highly recommend A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to readers ages eleven and up.

By Piranha T.

In Inside Out & Back Again, Thanhha Lai narrates the story of ten-year-old Hà, a girl who has grown up in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Forced to flee her home with the end of the Vietnam War, Hà struggles to make a new life for herself in Alabama, while trying to learn the language, make friends, and understand the world around her.

Inside Out & Back Again was a moving, beautifully written book in free verse. Hà’s life was a moving and very real journey, from a war-torn homeland to peace in a foreign country, the story of a girl who longed for her old life despite all the horrors which were taking place where she had once lived. That reality in the story made it in some ways more powerful than many historical fiction novels which I’ve read—not a fictitious story, something imagined many years later by someone who had never experienced what they were writing about, but something based in real life, in the confusion and dreams of a relatable girl in a terrible situation.

This isn’t a book I’ll forget soon, and I doubt anyone will. I would highly recommend Inside Out & Back Again to readers ages ten and up, particularly those who love Farewell to Manzanar or Brown Girl Dreaming.

Check out our new post on Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky, which can be found on our nonfiction page! 

Interview by Piranha T. and Super Kitty

Kali Wallace is the author of several books for teens and the middle-grade novel City of Islands, which stuck out to us particularly because of its incredible plot and world building. We’re thrilled to get the chance to feature her as this month’s interview!
 

RapunzelReads: City of Islands has an interesting world, with unusual magic. How did you go about creating that world? 

Kali Wallace: I always start by imagining a world I would really, truly want to visit. If I'm going to expect readers to go on a journey in my invented world, it has to be one that appeals to them, right? So when I was imagining the City of Islands, I was thinking about foggy, beautiful, ancient, and mysterious islands. A place where people from all over the world travel and trade and live. A place where people live crowded on steep, rocky islands, all in a tumbling, scrambling, vibrant, lively symphony of life and noise and light. 

I wanted it to have a rich, long history, one full of stories and myths--and those were some of the most fun aspects of the world to invent! Making of myths and stories for an imaginary world is always a delight. I have always been fascinated with tales of lost worlds or underwater cities, and I wanted to create a world in which those stories were true.

But I also wanted it to be a place with deep unfairness and inequality. There are rich people and poor people, masters and servants, and magic is one way that people like