Washoe County Library System

A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there...

In Georgia's Swallow Hill turpentine camp in 1932, Rae Lynn Cobb, disguised as a man, hides out from those who would wrongly accuse her for murdering her husband and struggles to survive harsh, brutal conditions with the help of two individuals with their own tragic pasts.

On October 29, 1929, life in the United States took a turn for the worst. The stock market and#x2013; the system that controls money in America and#x2013; plunged to a record low. But this event was only the beginning of many bad years to come. By the early 1930s, one out of three people was not working. People lost their jobs, their houses, or both and ended up in shantytowns called "Hoovervilles" named for the president at the time of the crash....

"Set during the Great Depression, Sarah Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a novel about one woman-and a nation-struggling to be reborn from the ashes. July 3. 1932. Shivering and in shock, Evie Grace Devlin watches the Starlite Palace burn into the sea and wonders how she became a person who would cause a man to kill himself. She'd come to Galveston to escape a dark past in vaudeville and become a good person, a nurse. When that dream is...

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past. Over the summer she pieces together his story. Having heard stories about Manifest, Abilene is disappointed to find that it's just a dried-up, worn-out old town. But her disappointment quickly turns to excitement when she discovers...

In 1933, what's left of the Turner family--twelve-year-old Hallie and her two brothers--finds itself driving the back roads of rural America. The children have been swept up into a new migratory way of life. America is facing two devastating crises: the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the country have lost jobs. In rural America it isn't any better as crops suffer from the never-ending drought....

"In Depression-era Boston, a city divided by privilege and poverty, two unlikely friends are bound by a dangerous secret in this mesmerizing work of historical fiction from the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfume Collector. Maeve Fanning is a first generation Irish immigrant, born and raised among the poor, industrious Italian families of Boston's North End by her widowed mother. Clever, capable, and as headstrong as her red hair suggests,...

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.