http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1291181...

A slightly grim tale of 12-year-old Virginia, known as Rusty, who returns to her family in England in 1945 after five years in America, and finds huge difficulty in settling in (to her mother's distress, she refers to America as "back home"n hence the title) and then faces further trauma of a repressive boarding school and her parents' disintegrating marriage. Oddly paced in places, but has the courage of its convictions. ( )

‘Virginia’, a nicely brought-up little girl, who was learning what a female’s role was in 1930s Britain, was evacuated to the States for five years during World War 2. ‘Rusty’ came back, independent, capable of sawing and chopping firewood, using slang and not afraid to speak her mind, uninhibited in a way some thought shocking - and not prepared to be a ‘nice young 1930s lady’. This book tells her story - one of rebellion, disobedience, courage, desperation, loneliness, caring ...

It also involves her mother, no longer a quiet housewife but a skilled and well-respected mechanic, a skill which saves the day more than once and in more than one way; her mother’s stuck-in-the-past, manipulative, control-freak mother-in-law; her father (a ‘mummy’s boy’) back from fighting; and assorted friends.

This book tells of the way the characters try to adjust to post-war England, and the enormous social changes.
Some of them are successful, but not all. ( )

(#22 in the 2008 Book Challenge)

This is an older kidlit title -- I've had this thing for the past year or two where I'm focused on novels and non-fiction accounts of the children who were evacuated from Britain to the US during WWII, based on a conversation that was going on with the Betsy-Tacy group. Kidlit fans may recall that Magorian is probably best known for the five-Kleenex Goodnight, Mr. Tom. In this book, Rusty, our heroine, has returned to England after living in Connecticut for most of the war years, and has a variety of difficulties adjusting to her "new" life -- feeling estranged from her mother, not being recognized by her little brother, having not suffered the rationing and shortages along with her UK peers, and generally acting too Americanized to fit in. She has a miserable time at boarding school, until she discovers how to sneak out of her dormitory and go exploring at night. The plot is snappy, if none too profound, and it's a nice look at the details of home life immediately following the war. One odd thing, which I think comes of this book having first been published in the 1980s, is that the author has stridently included robust mentions of menstruating and bathroom use. They don't have anything at all to do with the plot, it's that thing from the 1970s and early 80s where writers for young adult audiences felt the need to hammer home the point that there is NOTHING SHAMEFUL about menstruating or using the bathroom. Now of course, it just seems jarring.

Grade: B- This is a serviceable book, but nothing about the writing makes it stand out.
Recommended: It is interesting, I think, for its subject matter of the returning evacuee, but even in this limited genre there are other books that do it better.