One author who seems to have seen the financial crisis coming is Leslie Connor, who wrote this year's Waiting for Normal. Another is Karen Hesse, who won the Newbery for Out of the Dust, a book set in the Great Depression, and who, this year, published the picture book Spuds. Set in an unspecified rural locale in a time that looks to be the Great Depression, the book follows three impoverished children who set out on an ill-fated mission to steal potatoes from their neighbor's farm. With spare, almost poetic dialogue, Hesse establishes that the family is short on money but long on love. When the kids end up having to come clean to their mother and, ultimately, their neighbor, all is resolved without anyone seeing the wrong end of a switch.