Janey's blue willow plate is her one prized possession.

The boss and Lupe's brothers then build Janey's dream house for her family. However, after she tells Bounce's boss what is happening, he fires Reyburn and hires Janey's dad. The rent-collector, Bounce Reyburn, is unsympathetic, and Janey is faced with having to sacrifice her one treasure. When Janey's mother falls sick, they have difficulty paying the rent. Despite the grinding poverty, the family is close and loving, and fun is had, as when Janey and her friend Lupe attend the county fair, and when the family goes fishing beside the river. Janey can barely remember her old home, a farm in Texas, and now that her father is an itinerant worker she has no place to call her own and no lasting friends, as the family has to move constantly. The picture of a bridge and a stream and a little house on the willow pattern plate represents the permanent home she dreams of. Her most treasured possession is a Blue Willow plate that had once belonged to her great-great-grandmother. Janey Larkin is the ten-year-old daughter of a migrant family in San Joaquin Valley, California, in the late 1930s when America is still suffering the effects of the Great Depression.

Written by a librarian who worked with migrant children in Fresno, California, this story of a migrant girl who longs for a permanent home was considered groundbreaking in its portrayal of contemporary working-class life in America. Called the 'juvenile Grapes of Wrath', it was named a Newbery Honor book in 1941. Blue Willow is a realistic children's fiction book by Doris Gates, published in 1940.

Blue willow by doris gates summary