New Books for Young Readers
I WISH we could fast-forward to the part of our story where—the hurt, the waiting, the worry— has already happened and I don’t have to guess anymore./ Fast-forward to the part where we’re history. / They call it a prison sentence, I text Maya, but it feels like a whole fucking book.
Excerpt from Disappearing Act.
Disappearing Act: A True Story by Jiordan Castle (Farrar Straus Giroux for Young Readers, $20.99)
When her mom reassures her there will be a Hanukkah present each night, it turns out to be one pencil per night from a set of eight. Following the dictum to write the book she missed having when she was young, the author of this memoir-in-verse consolidates the experiences of her middle grade and high school years, navigating life as her sometimes unevenly tempered dad is incarcerated for embezzlement. Woven into her story are her feelings of shame, anger, resentment, guilt, confusion, ambivalence, loyalty, betrayal, loneliness and friendship.
Across So Many Seas by Ruth Behar (Penguin Young Readers Group, $17.99)
“I feel like I carry a lot of history on my shoulders. Not only were my ancestors driven out of Spain, but my abuela had to leave Turkey and my parents had to leave Cuba. So many seas were crossed. So much had to happen before I could be born here in this place.” Told in four parts—in 1492 Spain, 1923 Turkey, 1961 Cuba and 2003 Miami, each is narrated by a twelve-year-old girl walking in the path of those who came before her. Each girl narrator is also struggling with growing up and learning who she wants to become. This bittersweet imaginative work of historical fiction tells of the Sephardi experience of exile, mourning, family love, grief, memory-keeping and resilience.
The Plaid Scarf by Sheila Solomon Shotwell (Sheila Solomon Shotwell, $16.99).
This historical fiction for middle-grade readers, tells the (eventually) intertwined stories of two white Jewish girls getting ready for their bat mitzvahs. It’s 1964 and 1965 in Selma, Alabama, for Sarah Mae, whose father owns a department store and whose mother is an activist involved in planning a civil rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sarah Mae and Gladine, daughter of the family’s Black cook, find their cherished friendship routinely interfered with by the cruel racial segregation laws of that time. Then it’s 2019 for Johanna in Michigan; her parents, alienated from their synagogue, belong to a havurah. Tutored in Torah reading by her grandmother, Johanna is figuring out how to have a “homemade” bat mitzvah when she accompanies her grandparents, who are blues and jazz fans, on a civil rights tour to the South.
The Blue Butterfly of Cochin by Ariana Mizrahi with the Indian Jewish Heritage Center and the Cochin Jewish Heritage Center, illustrated by Siona Benjamin (Kalaniot Books, $19.99)
“Stories didn’t take space in a suitcase. She didn’t have to choose. She would carry them all in her heart.” In the 1950s, a young girl from the almost-3,000-year-old Jewish Malabari community of India is both heartbroken and excited that they have decided to relocate en masse to Israel. This colorful picture book also has extensive historical backmatter.
The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman by Mari Lowe (Levine Querido, $18.99)
The most popular girl in the most admired “good” sixth-grade class in an Orthodox girls’ yeshiva surprisingly reaches out to the most left-out girl, her next-door neighbor, and invites her to join her in some pranks to “liven up” things among their classmates. The pranks begin to take on a sinister aspect in this suspenseful, morally nuanced middle-grade novel about forgiveness and repentance, narrated by the left-out girl.
The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler (Carol Rhoda Book/Lerner, $19.99)
Twelve-year-old Rosie, narrator of this novel, is a musical prodigy, on strike and not playing the violin—to the consternation especially of her mother. As the novel moves forward, Rosie discovers that her grandmother is the child of Holocaust survivors, and that each generation in the chain of women in her family has carried and passed along a burden of trauma, not always gracefully. Along with the burdens are gifts, including a love and genius for music, and synesthesia, a neurodivergence where Rosie sees color when she hears sounds, and hears sounds when she sees colors. (It’s a mixed blessing; Rosie gets headaches at museums.) Each link in this generational chain also feels deeply deprived, and yet tries to compensate and protect the next generation, with sometimes unintentionally hurtful results.
Tree. Table. Book. by Lois Lowry (Clarion Books, $18.99)
Drawing on word associations and tapping into memories, eleven-year-old Sophie, who is not Jewish, tries to coach her very dear best friend and neighbor, Sophie Gershowitz, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, so she can pass a cognitive test and not need to move away to a supportive care environment near her son.
One of a Kind: The Life of Sydney Taylor by Richard Michelson, illustrated by Sarah Green (Calkins Creek/Astra, $18.99)
“Sarah loves lighting the Sabbath candles every Friday evening. But Mama and Papa encourage the girls to learn American customs, ‘so you shouldn’t feel like foreigners in your own country’” A picture book biography of the author, who as a girl changed her name from Sarah to Sydney, and whose 1951 middle-grade novels All-of-a-Kind Family and its sequels explore Taylor’s own immigrant family of five sisters growing up on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth century. Her books were the first richly ethnic Jewish novels published for a general American readership, still beloved and popular today.
What Rosa Brought by Jacob Sager Weinstein, illustrated by Eliza Wheeler (HarperCollins, $19.99)
In this picture book the author tells the story of his then four-year-old mother who grew up in Nazi-occupied Vienna. It’s about her day-to-day life and the resourcefulness of her family until she and her parents escaped. Her grandmother was not able to get a visa. “Rosa never saw her grandmother again. But she took her love all the way to America and carried it in her heart throughout her life.”
Naomi Danis is an editor emerita at Lilith and the author of several picture books, most recently Bye, Car.
