Love from Your Friend, Hannah by Mindy Warshaw Skolsky

Hannah wrote her letter after letter, but never once received a response. Besides trying to make ends meet during the Depression, Hannah is also distraught when her best friend Aggie moves away. Hannah and her parents manage and live in the back of the Grand View Restaurant in Grand View, New York. Love from Your Friend, Hannah by Mindy Warshaw Skolsky is an excellent historical fiction novel that tells the riveting tale of a young girl named Hannah struggling to live both physically and socially during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. *I didn't catch this when I read this book a good decade ago (or more), but I'm pretty sure that FDR's letters are actually written by his secretary, lovely as the personal touch would be were it otherwise - since Missy takes care to point out that you should know your boss's voice well enough to write letters for him/her. That isolated feeling cements the setting, and it's really well done.

And that Kansas was once considered half a world away.

It really does seem that this is one of the last few possible settings for this sort of insularity - in four years, the US will enter WWII, and after that the entire world will have changed - and it's interesting that the big (and only) opportunity Hannah has to broaden her world is through her pen pal from Kansas.

Her story is set toward the end of the Great Depression, but her family earns enough through their restaurant, and she lives in a small-town bubble with occasional breaks for helping the less fortunate. Hannah's entire life is pretty charming, too. This is just as delightful as I remembered I'm usually not a fan of epistolary novels, but Hannah's voice is so charming - and so is her grandmother's! And FDR's secretary!* - and the storytelling is so clear without ever taking on the self-conscious tone that epistolary novels can have.