New Books for Curious Kids
Joyful Song: A Naming Story by Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Susan Gal (Levine Querido, $18.99)
“It’s my baby sister’s very first Shabbat and we get to stand on the bima with the Rabbi in front of everyone and announce her name to the world!” Zachary, with a little help from his Mama and Mommy, refrains from revealing the baby’s name too soon, offering instead nicknames—Little Babka, Shayneh Maideleh and Snuggle Bunny—to the friendly neighbors who ask and then are all invited to come along to the synagogue for the baby-girl-naming ceremony.
Ping Pong Shabbat: The True Story of Champion Estee Ackerman by Ann Diament Koffsky, pictures by Abigail Rajunov (Little Bee Books, $18.99)
From first watching the ball whiz back and forth between her dad and her brother, Estee practiced and practiced and came to beat them, to love the game, and eventually to want to play anyone, anywhere anytime. And yet “… when Estee [age 11] signed up for tournaments, she made sure to choose ones that were scheduled on any other day of the week. But never on Shabbat.”
Code Name Kingfisher by Liz Kessler (Aladdin, $18.99)
Two teenage sisters in Nazi-occupied Holland are sent away by their Jewish parents to stay safe passing as non-Jews in the care of a Dutch family. The older sister becomes active in the Resistance, taking on dangerous missions to help rescue other Jewish children, keeping her work secret even from her younger sister. The younger sister is now a grandmother, and in this middle-grade historical novel, her granddaughter, for a school assignment, successfully gets her to reveal their story, helping to heal the family’s trauma.
The Many Problems of Rochel-Leah by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Felishia Henditirto (Apples & Honey Press, $19.95)
“The first problem Rochel-Leah had was that she was a girl… And more than anything in the world, more than anything in God’s universe, Rochel-Leah wanted to learn to read.” This picture book is inspired by the author’s very determined 19th century Eastern European ancestor who was a family legend for finding her way.
The Wilderness of Girls by Madeline Claire Franklin (Zando Young Readers, $19.99)
“The girls had never been taught to fear their desires, or pass judgment on their own emotions. They learned to survive harsh winters and coyote attacks, but they had never needed to learn how to protect themselves emotionally….” One of four feral girls has her leg caught in a bear trap, and they are rescued and helped by a teenage girl, a parttime forest ranger who is escaping her own troubled past. (And who, incidentally, has a Jewish grandmother.) In this young adult novel that explores the compromises young women make in our civilized lives, the characters encounter domestic vioience, sexual abuse and suicide. And yet while their natural instincts, energies and power are sometimes tamed and even relinquished, this novel is not entirely bleak. “One truth does not always negate another. We may never have all the answers to our questions, but there is room for uncertainty in this world—in fact, it is built upon it. There is room for the unknown, the undefined. There is room for magic, and wildness. There is room for so much more than any of us had ever dared to imagine….And how beautiful this world must be, to contain so many possibilities.”
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold (Balzer + Bray/Harper Collins, $19.99)
“I want to believe what Opa told me that day in the country: that our capacity to love is greater than their hate. But….is it? The hate the Romanians and the Germans have for us is powerful. Their hate is enormous—as wide as the sky—but also so petty and small that it will go into the littlest room in a family apartment, seek out the one scrap of delicate beauty and destroy it.” In this young adult historical novel, based on the author’s grandmother’s life, teenager Reike, narrates her complicated relationship with her older sister. They grow up with a mother who finds it hard to accept that their perennially absent father is a philanderer, and their protective, tolerant, religious grandfather. Woven into the details of their daily lives with dance classes and crushes, are the harrowing experiences they endure during the years 1939- 1945 as their beloved town, Czernowitz, is serially occupied by the Nazis and Soviets.
Not Nothing by Gayle Forman (Aladdin, $17.99)
Facing the possibility of being sent by a judge to reform school for a hate crime, a 12-year-old boy is assigned to volunteer at an old age home where a 107-year-old Holocaust survivor—who hasn’t spoken in the years since his arrival and is thought to be mute—opens up to him, changing both their lives. Forman writes in an author’s note, “I wanted to explore less what prompts a ‘good person’ to become ‘evil’ and more what prompts a not-so-good person to become good or even heroic.”
Safiyyah’s War by Hiba Noor Khan (Allida, $19.99)
A map-loving, intellectually curious, brave 11-year-old Muslim girl, whose big heart sometimes gets in the way of obeying her parents, is at the center of this hope- inspiring middle grade historical novel based on the true story of how the Muslim community of the Grand Mosque of Paris was active in the Resistance and rescued Jews, helping them escape Nazi-occupied France.
Naomi Danis is an editor emerita at Lilith and the author of several picture books, most recently Bye, Car.
