Together Apart

Starred review from September 23, 2002
Gray's (Holding Up the Earth) coming-of-age tale set on the Nebraska prairie in 1888 is as carefully crafted as an heirloom quilt. The story unfolds through the alternating perspectives of narrators 14-year-old Hannah and 15-year-old Isaac, who both accept jobs from progressive Eliza Moore, the judge's widow—and fall in love. Hannah's family is still reeling from a devastating blizzard (an afterword describes the one that served as inspiration for the book) in which many local schoolchildren perished, including two of Hannah's brothers. Hannah herself survived by sheltering in a haystack with Isaac, and the incident stirred up gossip. In the confines of her family's cramped sod house, Hannah feels the full weight of her father's grief, anger and shame, which prompts her to seek work with Widow Moore. Isaac, meanwhile, has run away from his abusive stepfather and a stifling life of sod-busting ("There wasn't any music in this work, at least none I could hear" ). The two help the woman to open a "resting room" for visiting farm women and to print a newspaper about women's suffrage, and their intertwined first-person accounts reflect an effective use of voice—Hannah's quieter tone (an answer to the widow's question "began to take shape, slowly, like bread rising") contrasting with Isaac's folksy twang ("I approached the press as if it were an unbroken colt—stout-heartedly but with a heap of respect"). The blossoming love story will keep readers involved, and Gray's memorable characters reveal the late 19th-century society's attitudes toward women's rights and class consciousness. Ages 10-14.

December 1, 2002
Gr 5-8-For her backdrop, Gray uses the historic "School Children's Blizzard" of January, 1888, which took the lives of 500 to 1000 Midwesterners. This novel opens several months afterward, and deals with two young people who survived the storm by burrowing into a haystack. Hannah and Isaac meet again at the home of Eliza Moore, a young widow. Feeling responsible for the deaths of two of her siblings, a sentiment shared by her unforgiving father, Hannah has fled there to work. Isaac, escaping from an abusive stepfather, is hired by the woman to operate her printing press. While the book starts by focusing on the teens' problems and their largely unspoken feeling for one another, much of it deals with Eliza Moore, who opens a resting room for farm women and disseminates feminist ideas through her newsletter. As a result, the tension drops to almost nothing. In the end, the teens' situations do show promise of being dealt with-mostly outside the boundaries of the book's pages. Gray's greatest strength lies in the poetic beauty of her words, but in many cases it prevents the book from being realistic. That the sentence structure feels starchy lends credibility to the book being set in the Victorian era.-Catherine Ensley, Latah County Free Library District, Moscow, ID

Copyright 2002 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2002
Gr. 5-9. Part romance, part survival adventure, and part feminist history, this novel sets a moving teenage love story against the daily life of a small prairie community, where the struggle for women's rights is just getting started. Isaac, 15, is on the run from his abusive stepdad. Hannah, 14, wants to escape her father's blame and her own guilt about having survived the 1888 Nebraska blizzard with Isaac while her three younger brothers perished in the storm. She and Isaac meet up when they find work with a feminist young widow, Eliza Moore. They help her print weekly editions of the " Women's Gazette" and establish a meeting place for working women. Hannah and Isaac tell the story in alternating first-person narratives, but there's really little difference in their voices, except that he is open about his love, and she is trying to deny hers. The women's rights' history sometimes reads like added on background. It's the personal drama that will hold readers--the haunting storm memories that reveal what connects the young lovers and what keeps them apart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)