Like Linda Sue Park’s book Keeping Score, Jennifer Holm’s Penny from Heaven is set in 1950s Brooklyn, New York.  Also like Park, Holm is writing what she knows, for the narrative is based on her mother’s large Italian-American family.  Both Park’s Maggie and Holm’s Penny are Brooklyn Dodgers fans, but Holm’s narrative is historical fiction and the Dodgers are only part of the well detailed 1950s setting. 

Penny’s father is deceased, but she has daily contact with his loud, loving, and unusual Italian-American family.  It is the summer of 1953 and Penny bumps through it:  adventures with her trouble-making cousin Frankie, heart to heart talks with her eccentric Uncle Dominic (who lives in his car!), a hospital stay after she is injured, and an adjustment when her widowed mother begins dating the milkman.  Along the way Penny is trying to gain answers to how her father died.  No one will tell her.  Perhaps someone should have told Penny the old maxim “be careful what you wish for or you just might get it”. 

This books is rich.  There is much more plot and action than in Park’s Keeping Score.  I prefer this book to Park’s Keeping Score, but I like history better than sports.  Read both and see what YOU think…

A Newbery Honor book from 2007, Penny from Heaven is on the current 2009 Rebecca Caudill list for Illinois.