GEORGIE’S MOON

In 1970, an angry seventh-grader copes with life in a new town while her father, a career Air Force pilot, is away in Vietnam. Every night, she looks for the moon, knowing that her father has sent his love to her on it. Her anger comes out in vicious spurts, cynicism and casual cruelty shielding her from her other emotions. Woodhouse gives Georgie fairly standard plot elements to help her out, a school project binding her to Lisa, a girl she simultaneously likes and despises, while they help in a nursing home. For all that these devices are hardly new, they work, for both the reader and Georgie. Georgie’s unwilling visits to the school counselor and her refusal to talk about her father give the reader clues to the welter of feelings beneath her spikiness, as does the extremity of her reaction when she discovers that Lisa’s brother has fled to Canada. And when all becomes clear, her father’s love gives Georgie the strength to soldier on without him. A touching exploration of an aspect of the Vietnam War not often seen in books for children. (Fiction. 10-14)