Young Willard faces the sort of challenges experienced by many fourth-graders: homework, household chores, broken eyeglasses, rain on an overnight campout, a bossy big sister, a grandmother who needs extra help. Yet he also faces challenges unique to his time in history: America's first year in World War II. WILLARD AND THE WAR EFFORT: A 4th-Grader in the '40s, is a middle-grade book of just over a hundred pages that uses colloquial style and a vocabulary level for young readers of today. Veteran author Perry Thomas tells what it was like to be a fourth-grader in the '40s-- when America went to war, and when the latest electronic gadget was a portable plug-in radio.