Making Tracks. This item is unavailable.Making Tracks

In 1934, in the midst of the Depression, fourteen-year-old Harry James Harmony runs away to find his father who has traveled to Chicago in search of work.

Grade 4-7-A short, insubstantial story set during the Great Depression. When his mother is hospitalized with tuberculosis, Harry James Harmony is made a ward of the state of Connecticut. Though nearly worked to death, the young teen is briefly happy at his foster home on a farm. After a polio scare, the farmer and his wife take in boarders to make ends meet, and Harry gets into trouble fighting with a bully boarder. He runs away and rides the rails, searching for his jazz-musician father who left the family to look for work. Throughout his travels, Harry meets a variety of hobos and runaways and is chased by the police and social workers. Even though the boy becomes one of the great unwashed, he never truly seems to suffer from hardship and deprivation. He escapes the adventure unscathed. Without being injured or arrested, he makes it to Chicago to his father's rooming house at the same time as the people who are tracking him. The story tries to cover too many elements of life at the time in too few pages. None of the characters or situations is fully fleshed out, and the problems are too easily resolved. Little sympathy is generated for Harry or his family's plight. Illustrations are primitive, surrealistic, black-and-white sketches. Overall, this is a flat, predictable piece of historical fiction that most libraries can live without.
Alice Casey Smith, Sayreville Public Schools, Parlin, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The latest in the Adventures in America series brings home some of the hard truths about life during the Depression through a riding-the-rails tale. Harry James Harmony is almost an orphan: his mother is desperately ill with tuberculosis, and his father has gone to Chicago to find work as a jazz musician. Harry leaves the foster farm and stows away on the train from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Chicago, dreaming of reunion with his father. He is pursued by the railroad police and tormented by his fear that he'll be sent to an orphanage or reform school if caught. Wolfert serves up a great deal of information about the Depression in this page-turner by focusing on trains and the people who were forced to ride them. Justin Bell's black-and-white line drawings are a disappointing element; they are almost aggressively ugly and do nothing to enhance children's understanding. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved