It's
Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
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Wendell, Mindy Nichols. California or Dust
August 25, 2026 by Holiday House
Copy provided by Edelweiss Plus
Lark Jensen and her mother, father, brother Jeb and sister Junie live in Oklahoma in 1939. The incessant dust storms, which have caused Jeb to have dust pneumonia, eventually drive the family off their farm. They end up in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where they live in a tent at the Fieldstone Farm Labor Camp. There are some supports there; the children can get breakfast for a penny. They attend the local elementary school, but the children, as well as their teacher, resent the “Okies” in the community and are quite mean. Not all students are; Helen even shares her lunch with Lark after a boy ruins Lark’s own. The family eventually moves into a tin cabin, but is never far from trouble. The children get measles, and an altercation at a Valentine’s dance results in Junie being hurt. Ma is having difficulties coping, and seems a shadow of her former self. Lark fails fifth grade, and is terribly embarrassed, but throws herself into working during the summer. Hope arrives in the form of Mr. Ford, the county superintendent, who advocates for the residents of the labor camp and arranges to have a school built just for them. There is a grant from the Sears Roebuck Foundation, and the children are encouraged to help build the school. Once it’s opened, there are kinder teachers and more support, and the principal even delivers doses of cod liver oil to students himself! When Ma finds a list that Lark has made about ideas on how to “fix” her mother, based on her conversations with a grandmotherly volunteer, Mrs. Oliver, she is angry and plans to move the family elsewhere. Lark and her friends have to work together so that the Jensens can stay. There are historical notes at the end of the book on a variety of topics.
Strengths: As a tween, I adored books about the Great Depression for reasons I can’t even explain. Now that we are almost 100 years from the stock market crash of 1929, I think the time is right for more books about this era. Fieldstone is based on the real Weedpatch Camp in Bakersfield, California, where there is now a historical site! Even though I’ve reread Gates’ Blue Willow recently, I had forgotten some of the details of camp life, and Wendell, who did the fantastic Light and Air, does a great job of showing what life was like. Lark is a great character who wants to help everyone around her even though she is barely holding on herself; even though tough topics were addressed, this book was refreshingly upbeat, and I enjoyed it very much.
Weaknesses: While modern people will not doubt for a second that the mother is depressed and sometimes too depressed to go work in the fields; I had some trouble with that from a historical standpoint. My Yingling grandparents had to sleep on my great uncle’s floor for two years during this time period, and my Clark grandparents were raising nine children; I can’t imagine any of them complaining or doing anything but working hard with a positive attitude, much like Lark. This attitude does, however, explain why Ma was so angry at Lark; it was considered shameful to do anything but try your best to thrive.
What I really think: I am definitely purchasing this one and need to start thinking about a display that includes some of my feedsack quilts and books like Buzzeo's Light Comes to Shadow Mountain Sanchez's The Wind Called My Name, Elliott's Bea and the New Deal Horse, Colman’s Where Only Storms Grow, Daley’s If the Fire Comes, and Lansdale’s All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky.
August 25, 2026 by Dutton Books for Young Readers
ARC provided by the Publisher
The Harlem Hospital started in 1887 as a branch of Bellevue hospital, operating out of a Victorian home and serving the growing population of the area. It is still operating today, although the building has changed. What makes the hospital particularly interesting is that it was groundbreaking in the hiring of Black doctors and nurses. This was not an easy process, and one that took many years. It is also the site where Martin Luther King was taken when he was stabbed in 1958. The doctors there saved him, although they almost didn't get a chance. Since there were Black doctors, and even a Black anesthetist, authorities wanted to move King, who had a blade wedged in his chest close to his heart, to a different hospital with white staff.
This type of discrimination was repeated again and again over the course of the hospital's history. In 1919, a young doctor named Louis Wright, who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, desperately wanted to be hired. He was... but only treating outpatients on a voluntary basis! Soon after, Coral Smith, a nurse, was offered a place and then dismissed because she was Black. The thought was that the white staff would not work with Black doctors and nurses. She sued, and got her place back, and this gave Wright the motivation he needed to secure his own place.
There was also Lurline Vassal, who in 1922 wanted to take a training course in nursing, since there was little that Black women could train for other than teaching. Most work offered was domestic work. She wasn't allowed in a class with white students, but the hospital put together a class of Black women at the same time that the hospital finally agreed to have Black doctors.
Some women fought against the odds to become doctors. May Edward Chinn started out in teachers college in music education, and the fact that she had accompanied Paul Robeson on the piano actually got her hired as a doctor in 1926. By 1930, there was an overhaul, and 40% of the doctors were Black.
It's hard to get information on some of these doctors and nurses, like Pearl Andrea Strachn, a surgeon, although others, like Louis Wright's daughter, Jane Cook Wright, kept newspaper articles about herself in a scrapbook. Myra Adele Logan did pioneering work in antibiotics alongside Dr. Benjamin Duggar, who discovered Aureomycin. Many of these medical personnel overlapped, so someone like Muriel Petioni, who started an organization to unite women in medicine worked with May Chinn.
This is a wonderfully researched narrative nonfiction book that reminded me a lot of Dreilinger's The Secret History of Home Economics, and it left me wanting an entire series of 32 page middle grade biographies of these groundbreaking medical pioneers! There's even information about the Harlem Riots of 1935 and the WPA murals painted by three Black artists. I loved that these survived and were put back into a renovated hospital pavilion! There is so much information that I'm merely skimming over it; I do wish there were a timeline at the back, but perhaps there will be in the finished book.
I'm always looking for interesting narrative nonfiction over 200 pages long for several language arts projects that teachers at my school assign. This would be a great choice for a strong middle grade reader with an interest in medicine. Because there are so many people portrayed, it is a little hard to follow than some books, but it was very interesting! The illustrations by the author are attractive, but I did find myself wanting to see photographs, but these may not always exist.
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