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Keep Smiling Through

Paperback(First Edition)

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Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview

A ten-year-old girl growing up during World War II learns the painful lesson that doing what's right is not always easy.
Includes a reader's guide.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780152053994
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/01/2005
Series:	Great Episodes Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	570L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

ANN RINALDI is an award-winning author best known for bringing history vividly to life. A self-made writer and newspaper columnist for twenty-one years, Ms. Rinaldi attributes her interest in history to her son, who enlisted her to take part in historical reenactments up and down the East Coast. She lives with her husband in central New Jersey.

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Editorial Reviews

* "Rinaldi creates . . . [a] vivid picture of the period she saw as a child."—Booklist, starred review —

From the Publisher

Gr 5-8Despite a lack of focus in plot and theme, this novel succeeds in providing a detailed picture of the World War II homefront in New Jersey in 1943. Ten-year-old Kay is an appealing heroine caught in an unloving home situation. Her stepmother, "Amazing Grace," exercises incredible abilities in the humiliation and cruelty departments, and her best friend is taken over by the golden girls at school when her brother dies in combat. The war is very distant and it hardly seems a crime when father won't let the older sisters buy bonds. Far worse is that he makes them quit school to work, and takes their pay checks and demands control of their lives in ways that girls of the `90s will find hard to accept. When Kay's grandfather, a German immigrant, is arrested and only Kay knows the identity of the traitor, personal bravery in support of the country becomes real. The death of her stepmother's baby that arrives prematurely and Kay's feeling of responsibility seem extraordinarily melodramatic, and are undercut by the sacrifice of her only doll for scrap rubber. It's the little details of rationing, the radio soap operas, and the ever-desirable "Mary Janes" instead of Buster Brown oxfords that make this story work.Carol A. Edwards, Minneapolis Public Library

School Library Journal

Wrapped in a WW II world of rationing and radio dramas, 10- year-old Kay learns that doing the right thing in life doesn't always mean a happy ending. Kay has become her pregnant, pampered stepmother's target for abuse: blamed for everything, slapped for minor infractions, forced to wear dresses made from feed sacks or festooned with ugly ruffles. Her stepmother's parents are kind to her, but Kay is horrified to overhear her German-born stepgrandfather discussing the old country with a local merchant, even taking a political pamphlet. After he and the merchant are assaulted by anti-German thugs, Kay tells what she heard to a reporter, making sure he knows that her grandpa was showing concern, not disloyalty. Her enraged stepmother straps her, later goes into premature labor, and gives birth to a daughter who dies in the hospital.
Writing about an era in which she lived (explained in an author's note), Rinaldi (The Secret of Sarah Revere, 1995, etc.) fills her story with lively period detail (from Mary Janes to Margaret O'Brien) and period attitudes, too (others know of Kay's suffering but don't try to help her). Though her characters tend to be types, or, in the evil stepmother's case, caricatures, Rinaldi allows Kay to salvage her self-respect with the information that the baby's death was the result of an equipment shortage—far from the front, she was a war casualty nonetheless. A bittersweet historical novel.

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