By Christopher Paul Curtis
A ten-year-old orphan sets off across Depression-era Michigan to find the father he's never met.
Bud, not Buddy, and he'll correct you, is ten years old, motherless, and done with the orphanage and the foster homes. Armed with a suitcase of treasures his mother left him and a set of homemade rules for surviving, he sets off across Michigan in 1936 to find the man he's certain is his father: a bandleader named Herman E. Calloway. What follows is part road trip, part detective story, part tall tale, told in Bud's funny, fast-talking voice. There are hard nights, a Hooverville, a long walk in the dark, a mean foster family, but Bud keeps his chin up and his rules handy, and the ending is one of the warmest in all of middle grade.
This is the one that shows a child history can be laugh-out-loud funny and still true. Curtis sets Bud down in the middle of the Great Depression, orphanages, breadlines, Hoovervilles, but tells it in a voice so lively that a reluctant reader forgets they're reading a 'history book' at all. It's a small step up in length and depth from the books before it, carried entirely by how much your child will love Bud. And under the jokes is a real, tender story about a boy who lost his mother and is looking for somewhere to belong.