A review by zilfworks
Anthem by Deborah Wiles

4.0

Picked up this Y/A book at a school book fair a few months ago, and liked it much better than expected. In the story, two cousins, ages 14 and 17, drive a school bus across the country in the summer of 1969, from Charleston, SC to San Francisico, in search of the 14-year-old's brother, who ran away from home a year earlier but who has now received a draft notice. The literal road trip very conveniently provides the spine of a more figurative road trip through almost every defining theme, event, and - in particular - musical genre of the day. (Sometimes the two teens' encounters are actually a bit too convenient, and the story teeters just over the edge of believability. But it's otherwise so captivating, I forgave that part.) The book (which I didn't realize until looking it up when I was already well into it) is part of a trilogy, and is clearly intended to be an engaging way for young teens who weren't around then to learn what the '60s were all about. And it does that well in all the ways you'd expect. But I think my favorite part of the story was that these two kids - ages 14 and 17 - were not only braving this cross-country, cross-cultural, cross-generational journey alone, and nervously but capably handing every situation by themselves...but they had actually been sent on the quest by their *mothers,* because they were considered the most capable, level-headed people in the family. I'm totally a sucker for stories that center the independence of their young heroes, and in which everyone in their world accepts that as well (instead of, for instance, seeing two young teens traveling alone in a school bus and having them arrested and sent home to mama, as would certainly happen today). To me, that was the most authentically 1960s thing about the book, and one of the things I miss most about the '60s and '70s.