No Star Nights by Anna Egan Smucker

No Star Nights by Anna Egan Smucker, illustrated by Steve Johnson, Dragonfly Books, 1989, ISBN 0-679-86724-4. Winner of National Reading Assn Award.
"No star nights" refers to the fact that this narrator cannot see the stars at night. That is because she lives in the steel-mill town of Weirton, West Virginia. She describes her town: "Some days it seemed as though there was a giant lid covering the valley, keeping the smoke in. It was so thick you couldn't see anything clearly. On days like that I felt as if we were living in a whirling world of smoke." The book portrays the steel mill from a child's perspective, saying "Sometimes we would imagine that the mill itself was a huge beast, glowing hot, breathing heavily, always hungry, always needing to be fed." Smucker creates the setting well, as she relays the everyday life of our young narrator and the way she relates to the steel mill. Her father works there, her schoolroom must be dusted everyday because of the dust and grit, and her playtime activities sometimes take her to the slag hill, a byproduct of the mill. She refrains from ever commenting on the environmental effects of all this "smoke", but the reader can see from the illustrations and the ever-present smoke in the story that the consequences are there. This somewhat biographical story is an interesting look at how one thing in your community can so dominate the way of life in that community.