Jenny B.

Your grandparents and your great-grandparents weren't always old.A diary found in 2008 by a seventy-nine year old widow in Evansville, Indiana provides a distinctly non-Hollywood view into what life was like during World War II in this racially divided war-economy driven small town. Our diarist is eleven when the story begins in the fall of 1940 and that's about all we know about the young writer; not even a name (or gender) is revealed. It's a personal diary after all and not written to ever be read by anyone else.Virginia Lee Brewster's the prettiest girl in fifth grade and it's plain to see our storyteller's head over heels for her. The next five years see the two friends growing up fast and experiencing infatuation turning into a love that's never questioned, although it's not quite what either of them always imagined love to be. Young boys and girls grew up quicker and lived faster during the war years. The future was far from certain and they wanted a piece of it, whatever it was.This stories that make up this diary would not have been spoken of in 1940s heartland America, not in polite company anyway, and they certainly would not have been committed to paper, even in those magazines kept behind the counter at the local drug store.