Gr. 6-12. In this entertaining entry in the My Name Is America series, teenager Otto Peltonen uses his journal to describe life in a Minnesota mining town at the start of the last century. Accompanied by his mother and two sisters, Otto survives a horrendous journey across the Atlantic to join his father in America, where he anticipates idyllic opulence. Instead he is faced with life in a shantytown where the division by wealth looms ominously before him. As Otto changes from a dedicated student to a labor-worn miner, his parents go through their own fascinating battles, which add dimension to the plot: Otto's father joins a miners' strike against United States Steel, the first billion-dollar industry in U.S. history; Otto's mother becomes a vigilant suffragette. As in his earlier series book Journal of Sean Sullivan (1999), about the Transcontinental Railroad, Durbin enriches his historic backdrop with references to Twain, Carnegie, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Historical notes and authentic photos round out this captivating, dramatic view of the past. Roger Leslie
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Card catalog description
In 1905 fifteen-year-old Otto describes in his journal how he travels from Finland to America, joining his father in a dreary iron mining community in Minnesota and becoming involved in a union fight for better working conditions.