GRACIE AND THE RADAR GIRLS

The bombing of Pearl Harbor inspires a young American woman to join a top-secret military group operating in the Hawaiian Islands in this nonfiction illustrated children’s book by Moore.

The author tells the real-life story of Gracie Hudlow, who, at age 18, joined the Women’s Air Raid Defense, which operated from an underground bunker on Oahu Island, Hawaii, from 1942 to 1945. The function of the WARD was to monitor, via radar, all surrounding air traffic. Moore’s text offers a simple narrative account (“With training complete and nerves under control, we moved to the plotting room with a new sense of urgency and confidence in our ability to perform well under extreme pressure”), avoiding any war-derived angst (the death of her fiance, for instance, is omitted from the text and referred to only in the scrapbook addendum, a valuable resource that includes sepia photos that bring home the historicity of Gracie’s experiences). Meredith offers full-page, often double-spread illustrations that evoke something of both Quentin Blake’s color technique and the physiognomy-accentuating, limited-palette propaganda posters that were prominent during World War II. While text boxes occasionally block some of their content, these pictures vividly capture the styles and attitudes of the era. Gracie is identifiable in the illustrations by her long, curly hair, lipstick, and rouged cheeks. She is at times difficult to distinguish from the other women depicted, but this is not an artistic failure so much as a reflection on the homogeneity of the WARD, which the photographic evidence corroborates as having been made up of almost exclusively White Americans. An illustrated timeline of the WARD provides a neat overview of this fascinating, lesser-known contribution to the American war effort.

An easily digestible true story that gives wartime women their due.