Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees-Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo-eventually intertwine for maximum impact. Carefully paced and told in lyrical prose, characters-all default White-are given plenty of time and room to develop against a well-realized, timeless setting. Cate’s grandson, Larkin, Ellie’s age, flits in and out of the tale before finally claiming his place in this magnificently related story of the wide arc of responsibility, acceptance, and, ultimately, connectedness. Cate fully understands the 12-year-old’s slightly supernatural sense.
Led by a dog, Ellie discovers elderly Cate-called “hag” and shunned as a witch-badly injured, living alone in a cabin on the mountaintop. After she becomes determined to use the resources of the woods, however novel and imaginative the application, to save her father, conflict with her mother and Esther increases sharply. She’s fully mindful of her place in the natural world and her impact on the plants and animals she shares it with. Never feeling threatened by the wilderness the way her mother and older sister, Esther, do, Ellie takes over many of her beloved father’s chores, finding comfort and confidence in the forest. Not long after getting them established in their new life, Ellie’s father is struck on the head by a falling tree and lapses into a monthslong coma, his recovery unlikely.
After losing almost everything in the Great Depression, Ellie’s family moves to the Maine woods on Echo Mountain to start a farm-then tragedy strikes.
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