Book excerpt: Making a Beeline Home describes a year in the lives of the two main characters, Bobbie and Allie, ten year-olds who live in a rural community in Arkansas in 1941. While this book is fictional, it is based on the lives of many real people, real places, and many actual events. The chapters alternate with one chapter focusing on Bobbie and the next on Allie, but the lives of these two characters intertwine since they both attend the same two-room school together and live in the same small community. Readers of this book will be moved to tears by the sorrows and hard times experienced by the characters and their family members and rejoice at the closeness of family and community. Actual photographs accompany the text creating a closeness of the reader to the characters. The author interviewed actual characters from the book and included some of these primary source quotes at the beginning of each chapter.