Most adult readers will guess that this story ends with the Larkins having finally found their “as long as we want to” home. It is Janey’s link to the past, and a symbol of the hope that someday she and her parents might be able to stay somewhere “as long as they want to” instead of only “as long as they can.” The plate “meant to her what a doll might have meant if she had had one.” It goes with the family wherever they move, but is never unpacked because they haven’t lived in one place long enough or in a house with a fitting spot for a precious heirloom to hang. Janey’s willow plate belonged to her great-great grandmother. “The words ‘no work’ always meant a move to another place.” This time, the Texas Dust Bowl has driven Janey’s family to the San Joaquin Valley in California. In 1945, author Howard Pease listed Doris Gates among only three children’s authors he knew of who had written “a story intimately related to this modern world, a story that takes up a modern problem and thinks it through without evasion.”īlue Willow is about Janey Larkin, a ten-year-old girl who has spent her life moving from place to place as her father follows the work. One notable aspect of this book is that it is considered to be, if not the first, then one of the first realistic “problem” stories about a child. Between 19, Gates worked as a children’s librarian in Fresno, California, where she became familiar with many children of migrant workers during the Great Depression. Blue Willow by Doris Gates was a 1941 Newbery Honor Book.

Blue willow by doris gates summary