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Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America

Home Front Girl is not only an entertaining and delightful read but also an important primary source—a vivid account of a real American girl’s lived experiences as World War II threatens and then begins. The website has images, resources, a blog, and more entries from Joan's wartime diary.


“[B]etter than fiction.”
~ Kirkus Reviews

"[R]eminiscent of Anne Frank"
~ Joan Hiatt Harlow


“An important and refreshingly engaging word painting of a far more innocent time in U.S. history. Home Front Girl is all about the thrill of being young, of questioning, and dreaming … and how those dreams can so easily begin to shatter under the crush of impending world events. The perspective here could not be more pure. Recommended!” —Graham Salisbury, author of Under the Blood-Red Sun and Eyes of the Emperor

“This captivating diary of the years leading into World War II provides a fresh view of the American scene, before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor."
—Donald A. Ritchie, author of Doing Oral History

"Home Front Girl reveals the perceptions of a creative, brilliant, and hopeful yet genuine teenage girl in an uncertain and perilous era. Joan’s charm, naiveté, curiosity, and philosophies (reminiscent of Anne Frank) revealed in her journals left me with the hope that such depth of thought, creativity, sweetness, and forgiveness—as well as her sense of wonder—may still be found in today’s generation of young people."
—Joan Hiatt Harlow, author of Star in the Storm

"A Chicago teenager's journal–riveting and real–recalls an era when adolescence was a preparation for adult life."
—Richard Peck, author of Fair Weather

"Her sensitivity to and exuberance about events large and small is contagious, though her poetic tendencies are tempered by her doubts, intellect, sarcasm, and savvy. Witnessing Morrison mature as a woman and a writer is invigorating and memorable."
PublishersWeekly.com

"These diaries are a treasure on a scale with Anne Frank's. They tell the remarkable story of a real girl in a momentous time in history, from a unique viewpoint full of humor, insight, and emotional highs and lows on both a personal and an international level." —BlogCritics

"A fine, insightful and sometimes moving journal composed by a wholly likable young woman—better than fiction."
Kirkus

"[The book] provides a window into the 1940s, a time so different than today, technologically, but strikingly similar as well. . . . An excellent [way to] . . . understand what the average citizen was experiencing while war unfolded."
VOYA