There's A War On, You Know! Susan Marcus Bends the Rules by Jane Cutler

Dear Marv, I wrote,

You were right about baseball. I am the only Yankee fan in town. So I just do not bother with baseball. I have other stuff to worry about. One thing is trying to get rid of my New York accent before school starts. Another thing is Jim Crow. That is the name they give to laws they have to keep Negroes and white people separated from each other. Can you believe it? I would love to do something against old Jim Crow, but I don't know what. What could a kid do against laws like that, anyway?
And one more thing. I have an ugly haircut that I hope will grow out in time for school.

Please write back.

Still Your Best Friend, Susan

In 1942 there's a war on, and a lot of things have changed. There are air raid drills, and Joe DiMaggio has been drafted and won't be around if the Yankees play the Cardinals in the Worlds Series. And now Susan's dad has to take a job in St. Louis, where everyone is a Cards fan.

Susan knows that things will be different in Clayton, the small town just outside St. Louis where they move. But there are still young men away in the armed forces, still double-feature movies on Sunday night with her parents, and even a tiny "hole-in-the-wall" Chinese restaurant like they one they loved back in the Bronx. And there is a girl her age, Marlene with her bossy little sister Liz in her building who make friends with her right away and show her how to roller skate in the cool downstairs garage and introduce her to the town's swimming pool and its high dive.

But some things are very different. People talk differently and tell her they can't understand her New York accent. Marlene's grumpy grandmothers complain that she shouldn't play with Susan because she's a Jew, something she never heard back in the Bronx. And then she meets Loretta, a black girl who lives in the basement with her mother who is the building custodian, and when she wants to invite Loretta along to the pool, Susan's dad has to explain that Missouri has something called Jim Crow laws that mean that black and white people can't go to the same swimming pools, schools, movies, or even restaurants.

But as the steamy summer goes on and the girls share monopoly games, Kool Aid, skating, and Loretta's mother's homegrown tomato sandwiches, their friendship grows. Then Susan discovers that there is an interesting loophole in Missouri's Jim Crow laws. Public transportation is not segregated, and Susan comes up with an idea for an August adventure they all can share.

"What in the world can you be thinking, Miss Susan New York Marcus?" asks Marlene.

Maybe she can't change Missouri's Jim Crow laws, but Susan believes the friends can bend them a little. Her plan is that she and Marlene get on the midday bus to St. Louis, and Loretta will get on two stops later. They will all move to the wide seats around the back of the bus and see all the downtown St. Louis sights together.

We all got dressed up that day.

Cranky Liz would not keep up. Nobody was waiting at the stop where we had planned to be, so the driver just kept on going. Now what?

The girls take the next bus, wondering if Loretta noticed that they weren't on the first bus, but when the bus came to the stop, Loretta is there waiting.

"She waited," Marlene whispered.

"She broke the rules," I grumbled, smiling. "Maybe that is what they mean when they say 'rules are made to be broken.'" Marlene said.

"Marlene, did you just make that up?" I demanded.

"No, honest, it's a saying. I think it means you sometimes have to think for yourself, like Loretta did."

And when Susan leads the girls off the bus near her parents' favorite movie house and takes them to their favorite little Chinese restaurant, the girls are ready to try to bend one Jim Crow rule. But when they get there, they find something scary:

Half the window was smashed, and on it, in thick black paint, someone had written JAPS GO HOME! JAP TRAITOR was written in black paint on the sidewalk.

"Let's get out of here," said Marlene.

Loretta and Liz did not budge. Liz moved closer to the window and peered through it.

And the Chinese chef and his wife recognize Susan and motion them inside. "Not Jap! Chinese," he says, seating them together at one small table. Susan's plan to integrate a restaurant is a success. Take that, Jim Crow! she thinks. She breaks open her fortune cookie and reads the fortune inside.

"The future sleeps in the present."

Jane Cutler's Susan Marcus Bends the Rules (Holiday House, 2014) portrays the world of 1942 vividly, with the sounds of radio baseball games through open windows, fans whirring in the summer heat, the smells of warm tomatoes on the vine and bus exhaust and Chinese food that remind Susan of home, all combined with the different views of race and laws in World War II America--a time when there were many changes and many more soon to come. Cutler writes comfortably for middle elementary readers, portraying a child's world that is different in some ways but the same as today's children share in the most important ways, the ways of friendship and family and fairness. "Rebelling against discrimination is only part of this appealing story, but it’s the most memorable part. An enjoyable chapter book with great potential for discussion," says Booklist.

History Mystery: The Light in the Cellar by Sarah Masters Buckey

It's April of 1942, and the strain of full wartime production is beginning to be felt by civilians. On the homefront, Molly McIntire's family has taken in a London Blitz evacuee, Emily who had come to Jefferson to stay with her Aunt Primrose. But when pneumonia sends Auntie Prim to a local convalescent hospital, she moves in with the McIntires for a few weeks.

Molly longs to help with the war effort by joining the Junior First Aid program, but Emily urges her to become a magazine delivery girl with her at the hospital so that she can visit her aunt during the day. Molly reluctantly agrees to keep Emily company, but she can't help longing for a more glamorous homefront volunteer job: after all, her sister Jill helps out as a nurse's aide for wounded soldiers, and her older brother Ricky is studying to become an aircraft spotter.

Still, Molly loyally loans Emily her old bike for the trips out to the hospital and takes her out to the little-used roads beyond town to practice her bike riding in preparation for their volunteer job. Then, while helping Emily ride, the girls and their friends chase their puppies Yank and Bennett onto the grounds of the local abandoned mansion, where they spot a mysterious light in the supposedly unoccupied Greystone Manor. Afraid that her big brother will tease her about being afraid of haunted houses, Molly tries to forget about the unexplained light.

Then, while helping Molly's mom organize Red Cross supplies for the nearby servicemen's canteen, the girls learn that seven ten-pound bags of rationed sugar are missing from the headquarter's storeroom. As the girls pedal out to make their first delivery of magazines to the convalescent hospital, Emily tells Molly that she believes the sugar has been stolen to be sold on the black market, just as some people had done in London. Molly and Emily determine that they will be the ones to solve the mystery of the missing sugar.

As they chat with the patients at the hospital, they learn that the kitchen there is also missing bags of sugar. When one of the patients, the actual owner of Greystone Manor, asks Molly to retrieve her reading glasses from the house, Molly is a bit intimidated at the thought of entering the dark, foreboding house, but when her mother agrees that she should do the errand for her old friend and Emily agrees to go along and wait outside, Molly warily enters the empty house and hurriedly locates the glasses. Just as she turns to leave, Molly hears someone entering the cellar below. Hiding upstairs, Molly hears voices as several men seem to be unloading heavy materials from a black van, and she hears them saying that they'll be "done by Saturday."

Molly and Emily are sure that they've discovered the secret cache of the black marketeers. While the entire town works to come up with enough sugar to make cookies for the troop trains coming through their canteen on the weekend, the girls decide to return to Greystone to make sure the stolen sugar is still there before sharing their suspicions with the police. Reluctantly, Molly decides to confide her suspicions with her older brother and sister. Although her brother pokes fun at the "girl detectives," he agrees to keep lookout while they revisit the old house. When the girls spot the black truck approaching the house, they can only hope that Ricky and Jill can call the police in time to catch the thieves with their rationed contraband.

Like the other books in American Girl's Molly McIntire series, The Light in the Cellar: A Molly Mystery (American Girl Mysteries) is filled with historical details of life on the World War II homefront. Molly's mom saves up ration tickets to buy sugar, eggs, meat, and gasoline, while Molly slogs her way through soybean casseroles and other "meatless meals," and ruefully contemplates sugarless cereal when her mother gives up her family's sugar ration to make cookies for soldiers bound for the front. As in the other American Girl books, an appendix featuring period photos reinforces the historical details in the novel itself. For girls who loved the original Molly McIntire books in the American Girl series, the Molly Mystery books, which also includes the 2005 A Spy On The Home Front: A Molly Mystery (American Girl Mysteries), bring back a favorite character in suspenseful mysteries steeped in the American homefront during the first years of the Second World War.