Walking on Cinders, a middle-level memoir, describes the author's early childhood. She and her three siblings were born at home on a small private island in the Fox River fifty miles south of Chicago. Island adventures and misadventures provide a window into understanding what it means to be rich while living in poverty. As inconvenient as island dwelling was, the benefits outnumbered the inconveniences. Would I have wanted to live in a regular house on the mainland? Never. The river was an extension of my home. It was an ever-changing living hallway inhabited by long-snouted leatherback turtles, thick-shelled snappers, bullfrogs, green frogs, crawdads, hellgrammites, mudpuppies, cat fish, bullheads, yellow mollies, carp, and bass. Ted and I caught crawdads and hellgrammites and sold them to the manager of a gas station who sold them to fishermen. We also speared spawning carp and sold them to elderly black men who wore suits and fedoras while they fished with dough-bait made from balls of white bread. At the river’s edge, yellow and purple wild iris grew among thick stands of cattails, and red-winged blackbirds clung to the cattail heads and sang, “Oh-ka-lee! Oh-ka-lee!” The air was filled with the drone of cicadas, the song of cardinals, caws of crows, and the sweet lyrical melody of wrens. Field mice, red foxes, rabbits, raccoons, and slow-plodding opossums shared the island’s cornfields and wooded riverbanks. How could an uptown house surrounded by a tidy lawn compete with an island home? Midwest Review by Diane Donovan: Readers seeking stories that don’t feature middle-class backdrops of wealth, but explore powerful topics of rural living, poverty, and the true meaning of being rich will find Walking on Cinders simply outstanding. Few young adult books before or since Robert Burch’s Queenie Peavy (published in 1966 and now hard to find) have so thoroughly captured rural living; poverty that others may assume but the protagonist does not; and the contrast between rich and poor thinking. Walking on Cinders is a unique opportunity for all ages to reconsider the perception and roots of wealth in entirely new ways.