35. Dogtag Summer - Elizabeth Partridge

Bloomsbury, 2011
215 pgs. plus 11-page q & a appendix
$16.99
For: middle grades
Genre:  historical fiction
Rating:  4.5

Setting:  Northern California coastline between Ukiah and Santa Rosa,: 1980, with flashbacks to 1975 Vietnam.

One-Sentence Summary:  Tracy, an adopted Vietnam War baby with an "unknown" American father, spends the summer before entering junior high remembering the events leading up to her emigration to northern California.

This story begins on the first day of summer vacation for two best friends, Tracy and Stargazer.  Tracy is the adopted, half-Vietnamese orphan of a Vietnam vet and his wife.  Stargazer is the son of a pair of hippie parents who were very anti-war, who happily live off the land in a tiny cramped trailer with their two kids (with another on the way).  So we get two very clear points-of-view about the Vietnam War.

Tracy was adopted as a 6-year-old, five years before.  She has suppressed memories of her life in Vietnam.  When she and Stargazer find an ammo box in her dad's workshop and break into it, her memories, her feelings, her life itself, gets tilted and questioned.
    
The beginning of each new chapter is a page or so continuing the newfound memories of her life in Vietnam.  Two point-s-of-view about the Vietnam War, painful memories of those who were forced to fight, and some really beautiful writing, all work together to create a lovely, much-needed, well-researched story.

(Note:  The one weakness for me is that there was no mention of Tracy's English language development in the five years since arriving in America.  That would have been so interesting - she is a fluent English speaker in the story, and I wondered greatly about that.)

I literally grabbed this book off the shelf at the library when I saw that Elizabeth Partridge had written a piece of fiction.  I'm familiar with her nonfiction, which is award-winning.  I also have a fond memory of her and her close friend, Anna Grossnickle Hines, who befriended me at a CLNE conference in Cambridge, England, when I was lonely and homesick.  I spent the evening in Elizabeth's dorm room, chatting and discussing kid's books.  This was just before her first book, the one on Dorothea Lange, was published, and she told me the background surrounding it.  These two close friends greatly impressed me, meeting each year at CNLE no matter where the conference took place.  Since then they have BOTH become celebrated writers.  Two gracious, lovely women.