The Length of a String

March 26, 2018
Twelve-year-old Imani is preparing for her bat mitzvah and working up the courage to ask her parents for the gift she wants: their help searching for her birth parents. As one of the only black kids in her Baltimore community, Imani is used to insensitive questions about her background and Judaism, and she longs to connect with the biological family who share her DNA. When she discovers her great-grandmother Anna’s diary of her journey from Luxembourg to Brooklyn to escape the Nazis, she finds a kindred spirit. Interspersed journal entries detail Anna’s story: she was the first of her siblings to leave the family, though her
parents planned for the others, including Anna’s twin, to follow. Anna was taken in by a kind couple, paralleling Imani’s adoption, but yearned for the day her first family would arrive. Readers and Imani know, though, that Anna’s family was sent to the camps, lending a grave undercurrent to her hopeful narration. Both Anna and Imani are richly drawn characters, complex and sympathetic. Imani gains insight from Anna that helps her decide what she truly needs to know about her past, in this moving, deftly plotted story. Ages 10–14. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.

April 1, 2018

Gr 5-8-Twelve-year-old Imani is many things: a resident of a Baltimore suburb, a big sister to Jaime, a Hebrew school student preparing for her bat mitzvah, and an adoptee. Imani longs for information about her birth parents and soon finds her great-grandmother Anna's diary. In 1941, 12-year-old Anna traveled alone to the U.S. from Luxembourg to avoid the Holocaust concentration camps. Imani strongly identifies with Anna's fear and struggle to belong. Imani, her friends Madeline and Ethan, and Imani's extended family celebrate their history as they deal with its horror and triumph. Imani finds clarity regarding her own background. Imani's first-person narration flows naturally with conversations about the mundane-Ethan's crush on her-and the serious-Holocaust research. Imani's curiosity and her tense relationship with her mother make her likable and relatable. Weissman maintains pace and interest between Anna's diary sections and Imani's story. The attention to detail, such as the scenes of Anna playing Chinese checkers with her cousin and Imani's tennis practice, make the story memorable. VERDICT Pair with this with Lois Lowry's Number the Stars for Jewish historical fiction with heart. An excellent addition with strong curricular ties.-Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Twelve-year-old Imani, a black girl adopted into a white Jewish family, struggles to negotiate her understanding of identity and place while also untangling the skein of her great-grandma's legacy.Imani's journey to find her origins leads her to seek resolution and guidance in Great-Grandma Anna's diary, which details her flight from Luxembourg to escape Nazi occupation. Along the way, Imani faces awkward, heart-wrenching confrontations with a mother not ready to answer questions about her adoption and about the challenges of being 12, almost 13, while on the outside of insider knowledge about both her birth and adoptive families. Cybils Award winner Weissman (Nerd Camp, 2011) creates a narrative strengthened by her smooth temporal transitions between 1940 and 2014 and her fresh descriptions of life in New York during the early 1940s, including the experiences of Jews in America during the Holocaust. However, Weissman's too-brief inclusion of African-American traditions and the few pointed situations in which Imani is quizzed or fetishized don't give readers the opportunity to explore Imani's thoughts about being a black girl in majority-white spaces. Imani's preoccupation is with finding her biological parentage, a journey connected to but not the same as examining her racial identity; this gives references to her racial identity a superficial feel.Still, readers will enjoy this trip through time in a notable new transracial-adoption narrative. (Fiction. 10-14)

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