Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: World War I & The Great Depression

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have fallen sick are quarantined into a separate ward to keep the plague at bay.
(Description from catalog)

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance. In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life.
(Description from catalog)

Fleeing the Depression-era school for Native American children who have been taken from their parents, four orphans share a summer marked by struggling farmers, faith healers and lost souls. (Description from NoveList.)

A maid to Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lizzie McDuffie, whose husband is FDR's personal valet, becomes the President's eyes and ears into the Black community, advocating for the needs and rights of her fellow African Americans when those in the White House blocked access to the President.
(Description from NoveList)

Volunteering for Eleanor Roosevelt's new traveling library in small-town Kentucky, an English bride joins a group of independent women whose commitment to their job transforms the community and their relationships. (Description from NoveList.)

In 1919, Jessie Redmon Fauset is named literary editor of The Crisis - the first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine. But she is also having a secret affair with the magazine's founder, W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite rumors of their liaison, Jessie is determined to prove herself. When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts.
(Description from NoveList)

A last-of-her-kind outcast and member of the Pack Horse Library Project braves the hardships of Kentucky's Great Depression and hostile community discrimination to bring the near-magical perspectives of books to her neighbors. (Description from NoveList.)

Born in 1900s Paris, Alexandra's life is shattered by World War I and the Spanish Flu, leading her to a journalism career where she meets a fellow reporter battling his own losses, sparking a cautious yet powerful connection.
(Description from NoveList)

Eschewed by her wealthy Smith College classmates, a former scholarship student reluctantly volunteers to join a group of graduates who travel to Europe to help World War I French civilians before finding herself surrounded by desperate families in villages decimated by German bombs.
(Description from catalog)

"It was 1933, four long years after Wall Street crashed and took the rest of the world with it, and the Great Depression was just getting started. And so was the Goblin. A master at turning hopelessness into a commodity, the corrupt mob boss led a colorful gang of circus sideshow freaks-- including the cannibalistic Vulture-- in a corrupt stranglehold on the city. Peter Parker came of age during this time of struggle and hardship. Raised by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, two stemwinding Socialists committed to positive change for the people, Peter would have been a boyish beacon of optimism in any other era. But in this world of noir, he was an embittered, angry young man in search of justice. And then along came a spider. After a fated meeting with a mystical arachnid and its life-changing bite, he may have just inherited the force to honor the phrase, 'If those in power can't be trusted, it's the responsibility of the people to remove them'" -- dust jacket back cover.