Moon Over Manifest

Moon Over Manifest is Clare Vanderpoole’s Newbery-award-winning entry into a tradition of books set during the Great Depression. Stories set within the Great Depression investigate issues of class, poverty, and more. Moon Over Manifest is set within the Great Depression, and the country’s struggles make the various plights of Manifest’s people urgent and immediate.

Moon Over Manifest begins as Abilene is forced to separate from her father, Gideon, when she is 12 years old. While she believes the source of their separation is Gideon’s superstition that he is cursed, it is also significant that he must travel to a different state to find railroad work. Abilene separates from Gideon in May 1936, in the latter half of the Great Depression. Work was scarce, and any chance of income was not one to lightly reconsider. While world economies were on the path to recovery by 1936, the Great Depression did not fully come to a close until 1939, 10 years after it began (“Great Depression: Causes of the Decline.” Britannica).

The Great Depression began with a recession in the summer of 1929, brought about by a decline of spending and a decrease of industrial production in the US. Due to the worldwide economic connections through the gold standard, a standard at which a unit of currency is backed by a fixed quantity of gold, what began in the United States spread to countries all over the world to varying degrees of severity.