nov23-upload

NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Start Here

Review by Susannah Felts

Sohla El-Waylly’s Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook aims to be a comprehensive, entry-level guide to cooking. It is mammoth, much like the Joy of Cooking my mom gave me when I moved into my first apartment. There’s a strong emphasis on technique—searing, poaching, browning, all the ways to prepare eggs, pastry 101—and clear indication of expertise required for any given recipe. The design reminds me of how recipes are presented on the internet: full-color, with tags and photo tutorials throughout. But many dishes feel elevated, far from basic, even when they fall under “easy,” such as watermelon chaat, jammy egg tacos and a quinoa crunch salad. I suspect a lot of newlyweds will be adding this one to their kitchen shelves. 

Sohla El-Waylly’s mammoth Start Here is a comprehensive, entry-level cookbook that elevates easy-to-master recipes.
FictionWesternHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Straw Dogs of the Universe

Review by Alden Mudge

Ye Chun’s ambitious first novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe presents a concise dramatization of the history of early Chinese immigration to the American West. Many of us know the outlines of this era, which began with the importation of Chinese labor for the construction of the transcontinental railroad and ended with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or ethnicity. Using a relatively small number of characters, Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of so many of these immigrants, and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.

The central quest of the novel is for Sixiang to find her father, Guifeng, whom she has never met. Sixiang is 10 years old when her village in Guangdong, China, is destroyed by a flood and subsequent famine. She holds faith in her ability to survive even after her mother, for food and money, trades her to a trafficker who transports her to “Gold Mountain,” a Chinese name for the western U.S. in the period during and after the California Gold Rush. Too young for prostitution, she is sold as a house servant, then taken in by missionaries. After escaping the mission and sheltering with a man who had known her father while working on the railroad, Sixiang begins the journey that takes her into the Sierra near Truckee, California.

In alternate chapters, we learn about the life of Sixiang’s father, Guifeng. Tantalized by his own father’s dream of Gold Mountain, he leaves home and contracts with a railroad building team. On his first and only day in San Francisco, he sees a woman from his village he had loved from afar as a boy, Feiyan, who has been enslaved as a prostitute. Although he is sent the following day to a work site in the Sierra, he continues to obsess over Feiyan, eventually returning to help her escape and later starting a second family with her. But his new life falters when he becomes addicted to opium.

At each juncture of her story, Chun examines both large-scale injustices—Chinese people murdered and their white killers released—and smaller humiliations—a temporary employer finds Sixiang’s name too hard to say and instead calls her “Cindy.” The novel culminates with the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from Truckee, once the second largest Chinatown in the US. It is a time of shock and terror, but for this novel’s protagonists, also a time of adaptation and endurance.

Ye Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to the U.S. and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.
NonfictionHistory

The Dictionary People

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

While there have always been avid crossword puzzle devotees among us, one recent trend that seems destined to continue is the growing popularity of word games. Whether it’s Wordle, Spelling Bee or Blossom, families and friends are finding daily enjoyment (and, yes, frustration) in learning new words. That’s the exact audience that will be delighted to discover The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, Sarah Ogilvie’s captivating, enchanting history.

The story of how Ogilvie—a linguist, writer and lexicographer—found her way to this project is almost as fascinating as the history itself. She begins, “It was in a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement, where the Dictionary’s archive is stored, that I opened a dusty box and came across a small black book tied with cream ribbon.” It was an address book, the names penned in the hand of James Murray, the longest-serving editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until his death in 1915.

Murray, a father of 11, moved to Oxford in 1884 to work on the dictionary. For years he used a dank iron shed, nicknamed the Scriptorium, as an office. Murray and his assistants sometimes wrapped their legs in newspapers to stay warm. Ogilvie compares the monumental task of compiling the dictionary to a modern crowdsourcing project. The editor issued a global call for contributions, reaching out through newspapers, journals, clubs and schools. The result, Ogilvie tells us, “was massive,” requiring the installation of a special mailbox outside of Murray’s home. More than 3,000 contributors, primarily volunteers, mailed slips to the editor providing examples of how certain words were used, giving particular attention to rare, new or peculiar words.

Ogilvie fondly refers to these volunteers as “the Dictionary People,” and set out to discover more about them. Her research uncovered “not one but three murderers,” along with suffragists, vicars, inventors, novelists, a collector of pornography and Karl Marx’s daughter. Through their devotion and love of language, the unsung heroes of the Oxford English Dictionary have helped us understand our world better. Ogilvie’s passion for the Dictionary People is palpable and contagious, making this book a sheer delight.

The Dictionary People—which chronicles the unsung heroes who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary—is sheer delight.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Favorites

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Juicy and dark, Rosemary Hennigan’s The Favorites is a standout dark academia thriller, with shades of Donna Tartt’s modern classic The Secret History and Emerald Fennell’s revenge fantasy film Promising Young Woman. Set at a Philadelphia law school in the days before and after the 2016 presidential election, The Favorites follows a bright young student dead set on avenging her older sister’s demise.

Jessica Mooney-Flynn enters Franklin University with one goal: ruin professor Jay Crane. As “Jessie Mooney,” the liberal Dublin native is accepted to Crane’s extremely select Law and Literature course and immediately begins her quest to become one of his infamous “favorites”: a status that is traditionally a gateway to prestigious clerkships, job opportunities and, if Jessica’s beloved older sister Audrey is any indication, a passionate affair. Back in Dublin, Audrey was the visiting professor’s favorite right before she dropped out of law school, self-isolated from her family and set out traveling, only to perish in a bus accident. Armed with text and email exchanges between the two—the last of which was Audrey’s missive “You know what you did”—Jessica seeks to entrap Crane. But what will happen when she too falls under his spell?

Hennigan knows the cloistered, clannish law school world firsthand: She studied the subject at both Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Pennsylvania. Jessica is a firecracker of a protagonist, intent on vigilante justice while still mourning the loss of her sister and fighting her growing attraction to an undeniably charismatic predator. Thanks to Hennigan’s strong voice and full embrace of the bumpy, twisty nature of retribution and revenge, The Favorites positively sings.

With its strong authorial voice and full embrace of the bumpy, twisty nature of retribution and revenge, The Favorites is a standout dark academia thriller.
FictionDystopian Fiction

The Future

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In 2016, Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, a radical vision of what could happen if women became the physically dominant sex, offered transformative ideas about gender and supremacy. Now, Alderman offers readers a plausible world-to-come in The Future, a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.

As a teenager, Martha Einkorn left her father’s back-to-nature cult on the Northwest coast to become the personal assistant to a powerful social media entrepreneur. Lai Zhen survived the destruction of Hong Kong and a year in a refugee camp to become a survivalist influencer. When these two women meet, the attraction is immediate, but their romance is put on hold as news reports stream in of an impending apocalypse.

The Future is awash with tech billionaires, preppers and an anxious population easily swayed by algorithms. It follows executives Lenk Sketlish, founder of the social network Fantail; Zimri Nommik, who runs the largest online retailer Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who heads Medlar, a leading PC company. These powerful techies have spared no expense to create safe havens for themselves and are ready to leave the rest of the world to face destruction.

The billionaires’ plan is thwarted by a band of rebels led by Martha and Zhen, including Ellen’s nonbinary child Badger Bywater and Zimri’s soon-to-be kicked to the curb wife Selah Nommik, who also happens to be a genius coder. With their combined expertise and shared conviction of bettering our world rather than manipulating it for their own ends, this group may just save civilization after all.

That Alderman keeps the plot moving forward despite constant shifts in perspective and time is a testament to her creative skills as a writer and a game developer. The novel never slides into parody, despite the three rather clever parallels to some of our real-life billionaires and tech leaders. Clearly, Alderman cares deeply about our future and believes that we already have the skills in place to course-correct. By the end of the novel, you might too.

The Future is a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
NonfictionPop CultureHumor

The History of Sketch Comedy

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

The prolific and hilarious Keegan-Michael Key—known for his work in “Key & Peele,” “Mad TV,” “Schmigadoon!” and as President Obama’s “anger translator”—shares his passion and enthusiasm for sketch comedy in the aptly titled The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor, co-authored with his wife, film producer Elle Key.

The book, based on their Webby Award-winning podcast, is a wonderful soup-to-nuts compendium of everything sketch. The authors trace its origins from ancient Greece to today’s comedians, and take readers around the U.S. and abroad as they consider influential American comedy schools and highlight the British comedians who are “courageous trailblazers who have influenced comedy around the world.”

Key also revisits his Detroit upbringing, detailing his comedy education in college and on various stages. Aspiring comedians will benefit from the book’s educational elements: With copious examples of (and scripts from) favorite sketches and shows, their creators analyze what, exactly, makes them so funny and memorable. Guest essays from stars like Ken Jeong, Carol Burnett, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tracy Morgan add to the fun, as do tangents about beloved colleagues like Jordan Peele and “one of the godfathers of modern sketch,” Bob Odenkirk. The History of Sketch Comedy is a highly informative and entertaining read that’s sure to inspire instant binge-watching and a groundswell of sketch-centric enthusiasm.

Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key’s History of Sketch Comedy is a wonderful soup-to-nuts compendium of everything sketch.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Glutton

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is a particular, fascinating branch of historical fiction devoted to probing the inner depths of individuals so legendary and strange that they border on myths. Such tales can take on all the verisimilitude and tactile detail of more straightforward historical fiction, while also saying something new about the time period depicted and the strange pathways through which we discover the human condition. A.K. Blakemore proves that she is exactly the kind of great storyteller required to pull that off in this tale about one of Revolutionary France’s most puzzling and frightening figures.

The Glutton is the story of Tarare, a young man who became a legend across France in the late 18th century for his seemingly bottomless appetite. Long a fixation for those interested in medical oddities, Tarare’s life is both dark folklore and a documented case of a man who could, and would, eat just about anything. Using contemporary medical accounts of Tarare’s life and condition as a guide, Blakemore picks up this odd man’s story and attempts to chart his journey to gluttony from his impoverished childhood to his days as a street performer to, finally, his death in a hospital bed, overseen by nuns who were both horrified and fascinated by his plight.

Right away, Blakemore walks a fine, brilliant narrative line, establishing Tarare’s infamy in his lifetime, then moving forward with a story that’s simultaneously sympathetic to the character and unflinching in its depiction of how far he’s willing to go in an attempt to sate himself. Though he comes into the world as a sweet, curious boy, he will eventually devour refuse, rotting flesh, and even living flesh. What forces transform Tarare, and what do they say about the society into which he was born?

Blakemore examines these questions while drawing readers deep into the entertaining, propulsive story at the book’s core. The great gift of this novel is that Blakemore somehow never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He’s a man, he’s a monster, he’s a frightened boy and he’s a living myth. All of these aspects live through Blakemore’s lyrical, sweeping prose, making The Glutton a stunning, mesmeric novel of uncommon power.

The great gift of this stunning, mesmeric novel is that Blakemore never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He's a man, he's a monster, he's a frightened boy, and he's a living myth.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

The Happy Couple

Review by Carole V. Bell

In Naoise Dolan’s addictive, rubbernecking disaster story about love, engaged 20-something Dubliners wrestle with intimacy and commitment as their wedding day approaches.

Oxford-educated Luke’s most striking characteristic is his obvious ambivalence. His fiancée Celine’s most singular trait, apart from being a dedicated, almost single-minded, internationally recognized concert pianist, is her willful denial in the face of Luke’s transgressions. Even Luke marvels that she puts up with him: “​​You’d think Celine would have seen my early diffidence as a warning. Whatever about the unanswered texts, me literally saying ‘I don’t want a relationship’ is, perhaps, a red flag. But Celine has never met sheet music she couldn’t crack.”

This dynamic is maddening at first. But, like reality television, relational trainwrecks are compelling. The first sign of trouble is that Luke and Celine’s engagement begins, excruciatingly, with what feels like a shrug rather than a decision. Discussing their hypothetical relationship limits, Luke confesses, “if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then . . . .” When Celine attempts to offer reassurance by suggesting that she “probably” wants to be with him forever, as if staring down a dare, Luke asks the question.

Though The Happy Couple will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, its wry voice and cleverly executed Rashomon-like structure, revisiting pivotal events and foundational cracks in Celine and Luke’s relationship from their perspectives as well as those of their closest friends and family, make it a standout. Bit by bit, in lean, ironic prose that packs powerful insight, Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, including brilliant sections from the perspectives of Luke’s best man and former boyfriend Archie, and Celine’s sister Phoebe.

We don’t see what Luke is thinking for a long time, and he’s easy to hate when he’s merely reflected in other people’s emotional wreckage. When, after 100 pages, he finally comes into focus, his sensitivity and depth of feeling are shocking. The closer we look, the more human these characters become, and the more it hurts to see Celine and Luke stumble away from each other. Dolan’s challenging and well-crafted rewriting of the marriage plot has much to reveal about love and perspective.

Naoise Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all her characters through a cleverly executed multiperspectival structure that makes The Happy Couple a standout.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

The Liberators

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In 2020, E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, rocked readers with its excavation of Koh’s astonishing family history rendered in heart-shattering prose. A tribute to her family, to her Korean roots and to language itself, Koh’s memoir was acclaimed for its tender yet fierce writing, as well as its compassionate and candid exploration of generational trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation and resilience. In her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh revisits these themes through the lens of fiction, unfurling a stirring family odyssey against the backdrop of nearly 40 years of Korean history.

Beginning in the 1980s, The Liberators loosely centers on Insuk and Sungho, a young couple who fall in love and marry in Daejeon, South Korea, but soon flee to the United States in pursuit of a fresh start away from the violence and instability of the military dictatorship. However, even in California, echoes of the conflict between North and South Korea continue to reverberate, deepening fractures in their growing family and in their community. Through the perspectives of numerous narrators—from prison guards to revolutionaries, North Korean defectors and the family dog—we witness the family navigating hardships and happiness over the course of decades, inching closer to a future in which the wounds and sorrows that both isolate and unite them can be healed.

Koh has crafted an intriguing novel of contrasts and complements. It is a deeply intimate family story, interlaced with high-level philosophical discussions of Korean history, politics and identity. At times, the story brims with tragedy and risks tumbling readers into a pit of despair, yet a shimmering undercurrent of hope always remains to offer a reprieve. It is violent and tender, wistful and hopeful, built from small moments and yet sweeping.

In such an ambitious book, it is Koh’s writing—a symphony of vivid imagery and emotion—that binds all the disparate elements together into something that will burrow deep into readers’ hearts and minds. A brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past, The Liberators is another resounding triumph for Koh that is sure to win her new fans, particularly those who prefer introspective novels in which the writing and ideas pack just as much punch as the plot.

Read our interview with E.J. Koh on The Liberators.

The Liberators is another resounding triumph for E.J. Koh: a brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBlack History

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The written narratives of enslaved people offer a window into circumstances that are, to most of us, unimaginable. These vital documents immortalize the names of their authors: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup and Harriet Jacobs, among them. But one woman wrote anonymously, perhaps trusting history to keep her secret until it was safe for her identity to be revealed. In The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Harvard University professor Gregg Hecimovich sets out to find the woman who wrote The Bondwoman’s Narrative, an unpublished manuscript bought at auction by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2001. Hecimovich relies on the scholarship of Gates and others to celebrate the life and work of the first Black female novelist, Hannah Bond—more than a century after her death.

Scholars have suggested other candidates to fit the bondwoman’s identity—women who walked similar paths from slavery to freedom in the antebellum South of North Carolina, Virginia and Washington. Yet Hecimovich successfully braids together the fictitious details of the novel’s protagonist with Bond’s autobiography, leaving little doubt about the truth. Thanks to his deep research—and despite remaining gaps in the historical record—the titular bondwoman comes vividly to life.

As a “domestic servant,” Bond was at the mercy of her enslavers, who sexually abused her and cruelly severed her family ties—a practice especially rampant after the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, when slave owners increasingly forced their captives to reproduce and then sold their children. Bond lost her mother and her child, but she held onto her hunger to learn and become literate. She especially leaned on Charles Dickens and Bleak House for help in creating her writing.

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts is a vivid introduction to America’s first Black female novelist.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Queen of Days

Review by Ralph Harris

The leader of a family of thieves, Balthazar Valdaren is about to attempt the most challenging heist of his career: pilfering a jade idol right out from under the nose of its owner, on the day of its consecration. From that description, a reader might expect this story to be about a crew of con men in the early 21st century. Instead, Greta Kelly’s The Queen of Days takes readers to the island of Cothis, in a fantasy realm resembling the 17th century. The swagger and the cons are still here, but instead of casinos and 21st-century technology, Balthazar and his crew are tangling with gods and demigods.

Kelly begins by introducing the book’s other primary protagonist: the Queen of Days, Tassiel. Tassiel, who will be joining Bal on the job, is one of the Septiniri: half-human, half-Ankaari, a god that can manipulate time. Bal and his crew—his bastard brother, Kai; his cousin Zee and her husband, Edik; and Bal’s young sister, Mira—quickly discover just how powerful a Septinri can be. Tass, as the Queen of Days prefers to be called, charges each crew member a month of their life to help them with the heist.

After that less-than-happy revelation, the action begins and does not let up. Balthazar, Tass and their scrappy crew run from planning to fighting to hiding to heisting with a ferocity that makes the book difficult to put down. Kelly efficiently relays the crew’s history and relationships through their interactions: Kai makes an off-color comment, Edik admonishes him, Zee rolls her eyes, then Bal keeps the plan moving. These quick moments of characterization allow Kelly to focus on the beat-to-beat action without pausing for exposition. As the outcast in more ways than one, Tass is the only exception. The chapters from her point of view are far more introspective as she learns new things about herself and the humans she is helping.

By the end of the book, some amount of heisting has completed, Tass has grown and evolved as a result of her time with the crew, and the stage is set for this motley team’s next adventure. The Queen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapist fantasy for readers looking to leave planet Earth for a few hundred pages.

A fantasy following a crew of thieves and con men on an increasingly dangerous heist, The Queen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapism.
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

The Reformatory

Review by Carole V. Bell

The Reformatory is a fantastical, elegant and miraculous delivery of justice for historic atrocities by master of horror Tananarive Due. The NAACP Image-award winner reimagines the deadly abuse that took place at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys—including the tragic experience of the author’s own relative, Robert Stephens, who died in 1937 at the institution—as a 1950s-era tale of ghosts and redemption. 

From the start, Due reminds us of the humanity of these children. Twelve-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens Jr. lives a hard life marked by striving and discipline, watched over by his 16-year-old sister, Gloria. Their mother is dead and their father, a would-be union organizer, fled to Chicago to find work and escape the Ku Klux Klan. The money he sends home never lasts long. Still, Robert retains his child’s sense of wonder and sweetness, as well as nascent otherworldly abilities he strains to use to connect with his mother. And despite Gloria’s emphasis on discipline, she takes thoughtful care of her brother, trapping wild game after church as a treat or adding smoked pork from a neighbor to their greens “so he could remember the taste of something other than cornmeal and soup.” 

With ‘The Reformatory,’ Tananarive Due honors her family ghosts.

Due excels in both style and storytelling, her sentences singing with specificity and creativity. The conflict that changes Robert and Gloria’s lives is simple and fleeting, but Due’s finely honed choreography makes the precise, exacting nature of Jim Crow racial etiquette visible. Here as in every other page of The Reformatory, historical context emerges organically, interwoven through story and character. When white teenager Lyle McCormack’s leering gaze—and overbearing, insistent physical presence—fixes on Gloria as they walk home, Robbie recalls one of the rules his father taught him. “He was never, ever to wink his eye at a white girl or white woman. Foolishness like that can get you killed.” Even though he doesn’t yet fully understand the sexual undertones and dangers implied in his father’s warnings, it makes Robbie see red that the rule doesn’t go both ways. Instinct overrules home training, and in a violation of racial codes several layers deep, “Robert ran toward Lyle McCormack, swinging his foot at the bigger boy’s left knee.”

Due captures every nuance and every horrible, deadly implication of these moments with surgical precision. Red McCormack, Lyle’s infamously vindictive and racist father, sees what happens, and Robbie is soon sent to the reformatory. And Robbie and Gloria’s threatening encounter with Lyle seems bucolic when compared to subsequent ones at the school, a site of institutional cruelty where the souls of Black boys snuffed out too early yearn for family and freedom. There, his ability to see ghosts puts Robbie in an awkward but powerful position. His second sight not only becomes a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory and what happened to the boys who went missing there, but it also may offer the possibility of salvation.

Due’s humane and meticulously researched retelling reminds us that nothing is scarier than the demons that walk among us. Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.

Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

The Sky Over Rebecca

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

On a gloomy winter afternoon, a quiet and lonely 11-year-old named Kara Lukas notices a snow angel by the lake near the Stockholm apartment she shares with her busy mom. Something about it strikes her as strange: There are no footprints anywhere near. Curious, Kara traipses out onto the snow to look more closely. As she snaps a picture with her phone, Kara has the eerie sense someone is watching her.

So begins Stockholm-based Matthew Fox’s evocative debut middle grade novel, The Sky Over Rebecca, which won the 2019 Bath Children’s Novel Award as an unpublished manuscript.

Kara spends her school holiday break exploring her strange discovery by the lake, which leads her to find a girl named Rebecca and Rebecca’s younger brother, Samuel, who is unable to walk. The cold, hungry siblings are camping alone on the lake’s island, so Kara brings them food and an old blue coat that once belonged to her mother. Kara comes to realize the siblings are from a different time: 1944. They are Jewish refugees on the run from the Nazis, hoping to be rescued by a British plane that Rebecca believes will land on the frozen lake.

As the dangers to Rebecca and Samuel in their own time intensify and her friendship with Rebecca builds, Kara musters up courage and decides to do all she can to save them—even if it means taking dangerous risks out on the ice.

Fox’s spare yet lyrical prose is well-suited to The Sky Over Rebecca’s haunting, austere setting and atmosphere. The novel’s stylistic restraint and vividly drawn characters will intrigue young readers and help them easily follow narrative shifts between the horrifying, wartorn past and the less deadly but still frightening present.

The Sky Over Rebecca does not shy away from somber subjects, including death. Fox introduces the terror of persecution in an accessible manner for young readers who may be reading about the Holocaust for the first time. A poignant final twist leads to a resonant conclusion in this memorable first novel.

The Sky Over Rebecca’s stylistic restraint and vividly drawn characters will intrigue young readers and help them easily follow narrative shifts between horrifying, wartorn 1944 and the less deadly present.

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