Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool is a tale set around the fictional (but inspired by a real) town of Manifest, Kansas. Told half in the summer of Depression Era 1936 and half in the end of World War I 1918 and 1919, Abilene Tucker is a young girl dropped off for the summer of 1936 in the town of Manifest. She spends her time looking for clues about when her father lived in the town in 1918. Manifest is a mining town filled with immigrants and stories and secrets.
What I liked. I liked how grounded in Prohibition and WWI and the Great Depression this book was. Its characters were just as developed as its setting, and both were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Shady, the saloon owner, bootlegger, and part-time preacher who had such great lines as, “It may be wrong to make whiskey, but there’s a right way to do it.” Also reading books that talk about the Spanish Influenza epidemic is so much more meaningful after living through COVID.
What was interesting. I think the author’s note at the end about how her grandparents were from Kansas near the real town of Frontenac, a mining town full of immigrants like Manifest, was so great. (In 1918, only 12% of Frontenac had residents who had parents born in America, the other 88% hailed from 21 different countries.) And various stories and characters came from Clare Vanderpool’s parents and grandparents real lives, including some of the odder and funnier stories in the book. I think kids (and adults) love to hear about the real and made up bits of historical fiction in a good author’s note.
What were some limitations. I can’t really think of a limitation; it was such a great book. I did pick this book up years ago from the library and read the dust jacket about perdition and fortune tellers and thought that I wasn’t going to like the book because it seemed kind of spooky. But I was missing out, because it’s only the narrator Abilene’s misperceptions of what’s going on. There is a fair amount of mystery and suspense (and a gypsy woman’s home that has perdition written on the fence) but it’s a really solid and good read.
Similarity to other Newbery winners. Moon Over Manifest joins a number of coming of age tales set in the Great Depression: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Jacob Have I Loved, Out of the Dust, Bud, Not Buddy, A Year Down Yonder, as well as Thimble Summer (which was written in 1939 as a contemporary-set novel and has the small town summer girl coming of age theme like Moon Over Manifest). It has more of the warmth and quirky town feel of A Year Down Yonder, although it’s more serious. The search for a missing father, piecing together the past, and exploring racial tensions is more like Bud, Not Buddy. Structurally, with the story within a story and the mystery of a girl searching for a lost parent as well as making friends for herself in a new town, it’s a bit like Walk Two Moons (although not as sad.) And the gypsy woman and her lost son was a little like Holes.
What it teaches me as a writer. Although the story that I’m working on is different in many ways from this story, there are some shared elements of a girl looking for stories of a lost family member within a town, and I think that the townspeople of Manifest are one of the best parts of this book. I think that Clare Vanderpool uses the newspapers and letters really well to add flavor and color to the main flashbacks to the 1918s that are done through direct storytelling. They don’t necessarily carry a lot of narrative weight, but they add color and details and make the whole thing more fun and authentic.
Have you read Moon Over Manifest? What are your favorite WWI and Great Depression historical fiction reads?
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