Pandas on the Eastside by Gabrielle S. Prendergast

Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction ( Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction-a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.įive years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. What ensues is a community coming together to protect the pandas, inspired by a young girl’s single-minded earnestness and determination.Ī book to inspire readers to be the change they want to see in the world. The pandas on their way to Washington are stuck in diplomatic limbo in a warehouse in Vancouver, and the Cuban father she has never known shows up. And then it all happens at the same time.

And Journey? Her mom has red hair, pale skin, and freckles, while Journey has black hair that must have come from her dad, but Mom never talks about it. Huang, the store owner from Taiwan and many other beautifully portrayed characters, all seen compassionately but realistically through Journey’s eyes. And as the book progresses, readers meet them all: the 15-year-old prostitute the alcoholic living on the street Nancy, her best friend Miss Bickerstaff, the teacher whose brother has just died in Vietnam Ben Wallace, a black American living in Canada to avoid the draft Mr. To Journey, this is her community, and these are her friends. Ten-year-old Journey Wind Song lives in the Eastside, a neighborhood of Vancouver some consider a slum. Prendergast imagines what might have happened to the pandas on their way to Washington, D.C., had the delivery not gone smoothly. In 1972 the Chinese government gifted the people of the United States with two giant pandas.

Pandas on the Eastside by Gabrielle S. Prendergast