BECKY'S HORSE

Becky Golden, in seventh grade during 1938, is the middle girl in a poor but loving Jewish American family that is shocked by older sister Mimi's bleached hair, puzzled by the Girl Scouts' ""survival hike"" because survival is no game for Mama and Papa, worried about unemployment, more deeply disturbed about events in Europe--but, as Papa says, thankful to be alive. The horse is only in Becky's head, a dream she's had since getting to ride one years ago, and when at last she wins a real one for 25 words or less about Bixies cereal, it happens that Papa needs the money to bring their little cousin (a refugee from Austria) to America--so she swallows her dream and chooses the cash instead. Domestic warmth and period texture, for those readers who feel that such fondly recollected families are not all of a kind.