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.

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.

It was considered a breakthrough book for its contemporary working-class setting and for the rounded portrayal of Janey's Mexican-American friend, Lupe Romero, and her family.

"[6] Many writers of the realist school preferred setting their books in foreign countries or in the past, possibly to avoid any suggestion of leftist propaganda.

Of our thousands of books, I can find scarcely half a dozen that merit places on this almost vacant shelf in our libraries; and of our hundreds of authors, I can name only three who are doing anything to fill this void in children's reading.

"[11] Children's literature expert May Hill Arbuthnot calls Blue Willow "a tender and beautifully written book".

[12] Another reviewer wrote "One sees in Blue Willow a perfect combination of realistic depiction of setting, careful study of character, and the structural patterns of romance, the linear journey to fulfillment.